Folded-Corner Triangles

What do you do with your leftover folded-corner triangles?  Do you make small quilts with them?  Do you use them for pieced sashings? 

Or do you throw them away without guilt and never give it another thought? 

Personally, I can’t force myself to throw them away, so I just collect them and stuff them into a big apothecary jar.  Looking through the jar is like an archeological dig.  Each layer identifies a quilt I worked on, in the order I made it.  If I couldn’t remember when I made the quilt, I would at least remember that it was before the pink and brown layer, but after the red and tan layer. 

The jar is overflowing, so I thought it would be a good time to use some of them.  These were on top of the jar, and from my latest project.  I grabbed a few and sewed light and dark triangles together, using a small seam allowance (about 3/16”).

  Since I’m not sure yet how I’ll put these together, I pressed the seams open.  Now I won’t have to worry about bulky seam allowances, no matter how I arrange the half-square triangle units.

To make sure they end up the same size,  I used the Bias Square Ruler to trim the unfinished units to 1 3/4”.   You can use any ruler with a diagonal marking, but this is my favorite.  My plan now is to decide on a layout and sew the units together in rows, using a full 1/4” seam allowance, then trimming off the excess and pressing the seam allowances in alternating directions from row to row. 

And now for the fun part!  These are some arrangements I played around with, using only 16 half-square triangle units.   I’m leaning toward the layout in the middle row on the right. 

If you’ve created anything using your folded-corner triangles, I would love for you to share a link to your post in the box below – it can be an older post, or one you do in the future.  Hopefully the Linky thing will work.  This is the first time I’ve tried to use it, and I’m a little challenged that way.

Hope you’re having a good weekend!

Kim