Half Square Triangle: Making the units

Happy Thursday, and what beautiful weather today! I for one decided to let my boys skip out on the majority of schoolwork today and had them play outside instead. All of us loved the change, and the sunshine and fresh air felt so good! Were you able to get outside at all?
Esther and I also filmed the next section of the Half Square Triangle Series. We did it live on Facebook, and the video has been posted to our feed so it is still available to watch on our page, Chicken Feed Quilts.
Basically Esther went over how to construct the Half Square Triangle Unit and showed a couple layouts as well.
If you prefer learning by reading and pictures rather than video, here are some written instructions.
The first step is to draw 2 diagonal lines on the wrong side of your background square. 
Next stack a print and a background square right sides together ans sew a 1/4" on each side of both lines, so you should have 4 stitch lines total that run across the diagonal. I sewed these ones in red so you can see the stitching.







After the lines are sewn you cut the square in half in both directions at the 5" mark, and cut on each diagonal as well.
Next step is to trim using the 4-in-1 Half Square Triangle Ruler from  Creative Grids. The markings on the ruler are for finished sizes, in this case we are making 4" finished blocks, so we will find the dashed line by the 4" marking and place that on top of our stitch line, than trim both sides.





Press the direction you prefer and you should have a really nice looking 4.5" unfinished Half Square Triangle Unit.
This method will give you a total of 8 half square triangle units from the two 10" squares (one print and one background)
If you happen to have Charm Squares instead of Layer Cakes you can draw 1 diagonal line and sew on both sides and cut only on the drawn line and this will give you the same 4" finished HST, you will get 2 from 2 5" squares (one print and one background)
Have fun making Half Square Triangles, next week we will do some layout work and see the many different ways these units can be laid out to make a wide variety of blocks.
Have a great weekend,
Kayla