Mystery Quilt – Step 2

Step 1 of this quilt is here. As I was cutting the pieces for this quilt in Step 1 I became a little nervous at all the small squares. In this step they were cut in half to make triangles. Triangles make me batty. In the spirit of learning new things and working on my quilting skills I forged ahead. There are 192 half-square triangle units in this picture. I know the key to piecing these squares together later on is accuracy. Oops, looks like there’s trouble ahead:

I was being very careful with my piecing but the triangles just wiggled under my regular presser foot. I tried my walking foot but it was too bulky. The ends of my triangles kept getting sucked into machine parts unknown. The last thing I tried was a new machine foot made for 1/4″ seams. It has a metal piece that sits to the right of the foot that keeps the fabric edges moving through evenly. It worked the best for joining the two triangles into a square. I did not like it for joining the squares. The guide is rather strict. You can’t compensate for prior piecing errors by varying the seam width, it literally prevents your edge from being greater than 1/4″.

My final step this week was to join two squares to create 48 units of the top formation and 48 of the bottom. I’m nervous about my choice of ‘light’ and ‘medium’ fabrics. The black fabric seemed to contrast much better before being cut into tiny little 2 3/8″ triangles. After creating 96 of these units I have no intention of starting over. I think I’ll just ignore the sizing and the contrast issues for now. I still love all the fabrics I’m using.