The next step

I haven’t been able to sew much this week as I’ve spent a lot of time at the hospital with my elderly neighbor.  She’s home now and I hope things get back to normal soon. So I’ll get right to the next step in our Thirtysomething mystery.

Before we do any more sewing, we need to finish cutting our 2 ½ inch medium and dark strips.  Keep the strips folded or paired wrong sides together.  Sub cut the strips into  4 1/4" rectangles then cut the pairs of rectangles in half diagonally just like you cut the C triangles.  Keeping the fabric wrong sides together when the rectangles are cut diagonally will automatically produce triangles and mirror image triangles.  Separate them into stacks with 60 of each.

To help mix up the scraps take about half of the triangles off the top of one pile and move it to the bottom of that same pile.

Using the triangles from the right side of the pile shown in the photo and the light rectangles that we trimmed last week, sew together one of each as shown.  To align the pieces for sewing, offset the half triangle so that it’s 60̊ corner creates a quarter inch wide triangle extending past the light background piece.  Press the seam allowance towards the dark triangle.  Repeat with all 24 light background pieces.




Take a triangle from the other pile and sew it to the opposite side of the light background rectangle.  Offset the half-triangle in the same way so that the 60̊ corner is sticking out 1/4".   I’m showing a pair of these flipped over because you want to sew them with the 60̊ corner going into the machine 1st.  So this is how they will look to you.
Repeat with all 24 light background pieces.  Again press the seam allowances toward the dark triangle.

After pressing, each of these units need to be trimmed to 3.5" x 6.5".  I usually just measure the width, because they were already cut 6 ½" and it was the width that was altered when the triangles were added.  You can measure and trim one unit at a time if you like or stack them up like I do.  I stack about 4 on top of each other lining up the long edge of the rectangle and offsetting them each perhaps by an inch.  Then I measure over 3 ½ inches from the long edge of the rectangle and trim the excess from the small triangles.

I hope you found that easy.  I guess that’s all until next week.  I have to start thinking about getting my taxes done.