Making many diagonal striped squares, the quick & easy way, for the Houndstooth quilt

Take a look at my diagonal squares: 

Nice, neat, FLAT (since today’s task is to iron the little devils).  I got a good start on all the squares that had blue in them, since that was the smallest color (just around the edges).  THere are a LOT of white & yellow & greys left to do.  WHEEE! 

Once you’ve got a whole pile of these, you can use the to do MANY things.  Alternate the direction of the diagonal, and you end up with little squares everywhere on the diagonal.  Alternate a bunch of 2 square diagonals with a solid, and you’ve got a traditional houndstooth pattern.  Line up a bunch of squares and you’ll have a solid diagonal striped pattern, with undulating or gradiating colors, if you choose. 

MY intent is to use them in a herringbone, which is one of the more complex ways of arranging them, and it requires mimicking the threads of a herringbone weaving loom, weft and warp going across & down… the thing that makes a herringbone when weaving is the alternating peeks of each thread as it crosses and then goes under a thead of a different color going down through the pattern.  My intent is to alter the traditional pattern by a bit, to include some stripes of different colors, ultimately getting a herringbone/plaid quilt, representing my stepdaughter’s alma mater colors.  Hopefully it will work. 

I’ve counted up all the little stripes that will come from the top and all the stripes that will come from the sides, and how many blocks of each stripe color combination I will need to complete this task, and I’ve cut them.  Here’s how. 

I took WOF (width of fabric… usually 45”) strips of 2 inches.  Anyone wanting to make diagonal stripes with jelly rolls (a more traditional, 2 & ½ inch strip), could easily do it, the little squares will be bigger and easier to deal with in terms of numbers, but of course, I wanted a lot of variation in my herringbone plaid pattern, so I went with a smaller size.  I could have gone down to 1 & ½, but the resulting squares would be so tiny, that doing a whole twin sized quilt out of them would have been extremely tedious as a first use of the pattern. 

What you need at a very basic level are two strips of two different fabrics.  Make them fairly obviously different… a large pink floral on a small green background, paired with a stripe of a large pink flamingo on a green background, will just look like a mishmash… for this pattern, you lose the identity of the larger prints.  It’s the perfect pattern to use with a solid or batik or small print, particularly tone on tone.  This is one where you want the two colors used in each block to be a clear contrast. 

Sew the two stripes together.  Width of fabric.  Press to the darker side.  Do it again. Then take the two lovely, flat pieces of stripes and put them right sides together, alternating colors facing each other (If you have the same color on the side, flip one of them to start with the other end).  Sew up one side, then turn and sew up the other side.  You will have a long tube with the right sides in, nice & flat.  The second side is SO easy to sew up, because the fabric is being held steady by the side you already sewed, and as long as you flattened them out, you’re good.  Just hold them against the quarter inch seam guide and it goes together easily.

PUT THIS ON THE CUTTING BOARD AS IS.  You don’t need to turn it inside out, press, or anything.  You’ll need any ruler that has a 45 degree angle on it.  I use a small square ruler that shows 45 and 60 degree angles also. 

For the first cut, put the edge of your 45 degree line along one of the seams up the side of your tube.  Please note that in this photo, I put the 45 degree line along the bottom of the fabric edge so you can see the line easier, but for the cutting, I slid it up to where the line was on top of the seam (harder to see on the photo, but when the line of stitching is kind of covered by the line on the ruler and you CAN"T see them separately any more, you've got it properly aligned on that edge). 

Position it so the END of the cut will be at the end of the tube.  Your first point will be just at the seam of the other side.  Slice the whole way through the tube.  The little end is a scrap.  If you have not sliced off your selvage ends of fabric before slicing the strips, then position your ruler so that the selvage is part of the scrap end.  There is so little waste in this method of creating diagonally striped squares, that the extra inch of selvage is not worth trying to squeeze into your square (and it would only make one of the edges more bulky with an even stiffer fabric in that line, a big issue since the seams of these squares will all meet in these little corners and create excess bulk if you don’t keep them carefully trimmed & small. 

Your second cut will start where the first cut began, at the point.  But this point is NOT at the edge of the fabric.  It’s JUST inside the seam.  A cut that made the point go to the edge of the fabric would make a larter square, but it would also require undoing the stitches in that seam allowance at the other end.  This is supposed to be EASY, so cutting it larger and then having to rip out several stitches in each square makes no sense.  If you need the larger squares, just make the strips larger by a half inch and cut to THAT line of stitching.  When you position your ruler to make the point just inside the seam and the 45 degree line across the bottom of the other seam, you've got it right.  Just make sure that as you adjust the point, you don't come off the bottom line, and as you readjust the bottom line, you keep the point just inside the seam.  It takes a little sliding around at first, but it pretty quickly becomes an easy task.

In order to get it apart from the other squares, you’ll cut THROUGH the stitching at the other end, and just follow through. 

Don’t worry that you’re cutting into an important seam line for the next square over.  In fact, cutting back that little diagonal piece within the seam only helps prevent you from having excess flaps of fabric at all the joined corners of the squares when you’re finished.

Continue this way up the whole strip, positioning so the tip of each cut is at the seam of one edge, and the cut makes a new 45 degree angle with the seam on the other edge.   

Before you know it, you’ve got a whole stack of triangles to flatten into squares.  For each triangle, pick it up by the light-colored tip.

  Lay the other side on the ironing board.  Put the iron flat onto the other side.  Hold the iron there as you tug the tip in your fingers away from the other side.  For this photo, usually I'd have my iron where my middle finger is.  I needed a hand to hold the camera (not yet completely high-tech with the presentation).  The point is to open it by putting the iron onto the larger light stripe and tugging the light colored end with your other hand, while pushing the iron into it so that the seam flattens under the larger dark stripe. 

Push the iron onto the seam down the center of the square, and push out. 

This should flatten the seam under the dark strip of that side of the square.  Make sure the seam on the other side of that strip also goes towards the dark stripe, and flatten the whole square.  Store the squares flat & ready to use in your pattern.  If you choose, snip off the little flapping ears at the corner of the square (it's seen coming out under the iron in the photo above).  This little excess seam allowance is unnecessary and will again create bulk at exactly the point in your finished piece where bulk is not needed.