Island Batik “Triangle Tricks” Challenge

The May 2022 challenge for the Island Batik Ambassadors was called “Triangle Tricks”. Each of the ambassadors had to make a project featuring triangles of any size or shape.

When I heard that, I immediately thought of stars. Stars are common in traditional quilts, but a lot of people hesitate because they are nervous of the triangles.

My pattern, Twinkle Sampler Quilt is a great introduction to right angle triangles. It includes half-square triangles, flying geese, quarter square triangles and split half-square triangles.

The 10″ pre-cuts from the Island Batik collection “Vintage Lace” called my name and I thought they would be perfect for stars. I love the colours and patterns in this collection.

I had a few options for background fabric, but decided to go with “Sunny”. This is part of the Island Batik “Opulant Oranges” gradations collection. This was a great choice because it is subtle enough to almost be a neutral, but has enough colour for interest.

I took the yellow fabrics out of the pre-cuts because I didn’t think they would have enough contrast. I will save those for another project.

I had fun playing with all the different star blocks and trying to plan the cuts so that I wouldn’t run out of fabric. Because the pieces were 10″ squares, I had to be strategic in cutting and the methods I used to make the triangle units.

Sawtooth star is a quick quilt block and great for beginners, but I only included one of these. The centre square is 6″, so it took two of the pre-cut squares to make this block.

I was able to make Friendship Star quilt blocks with only one 10″ square. A 5″ square makes half-square triangles two at a time, so I only needed two to make the four half-square triangle units. I included three friendship star blocks.

This LeMoyne Star is made with half-square triangles instead of parallelograms.

Sarah’s Choice is really similar to LeMoyne Star. It is also made with half-square triangles, but the ones in the centre are in the opposite orientation.

The Memory quilt block is made with many small half-square triangles. I had some papers that let me make the triangle units by paper piecing using 2-1/2″ strips. This meant I could make the whole block from one pre-cut piece.

I made four Martha Washington quilt blocks for the corners of the quilt. They all have the same pink fabric in the centre of the block with different colours of flying geese.

I finished the quilt with simple wavy diagonal line quilting using yellow 40 wt thread from Aurifil.

I love how the quilt turned out. The Vintage Lace fabric looks great on the Sunny yellow background.

Thanks to all the Island Batik, Hobbs Batting and Aurifil for providing the materials for this project.

Be sure to check out all the other great triangle projects made by my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors: