Fathers' Choice Quilt Block
With Father’s Day coming up, I thought it would be fun to do a block called Father’s Choice. Hi, this is Penny Halgren from QuiltBlockLibrary.com and QuiltBlockLibrary.TV. This block is really easy to sew. It has square and half square triangles and I’m going to show how to use a nifty little tool that I just discovered on my sewing machine that will help increase the accuracy of sewing half-square triangles. So I’ve got all my pieces cut out and I’m ready to start. So let’s go.
You can see in the pattern that you’ve got all of these half-square triangles and I like to find ways that I can speed this so that it saves time and also it’s pretty cool if I can find a way to increase my accuracy when I’m sewing triangles. So I discovered actually this person sent me information about this little nifty little template called “Clearly Perfect Angles” and you can see it just kind of lays down on top of my sewing machine and what I can do is line up my squares because what I’m going to be doing is sewing squares on each side of a cutting line and then I’m going to cut down to make my half-square triangles.
So the way this works is I’m going to line up my square. I’m going to line up this side with that gray line and my point with this gray line and then I’m going to sew down the side. And you can see one seam here so then what I’m going to need to do is turn it around and go through the same process to sew the other seam on the other side.
Now that I have all of these sewn, I’m just going to take them over to my embroidery cutting mat and I’ll put my ruler down a quarter of inch away from one of the seam lines. It should line up in the center and then we cut them apart and fold them open. I should have some really nice half-square triangles.
Now that I have half-square triangles are sewn and I already have block lay out to where I’m going to sew it together. And so the first thing I’m going to do is take these two columns. I’ll take this and sew them together and then I’ll take the center too and sew them together.
Now we have these two pairs of column sewn together so I’m going to take these. They’re all put together still and flat them over there and stitch down here. Now what I’m going to do before I pick this up is just put a pin in each one of this so I know where I’m going to be sewing.
Now we just have one more patch to sew on to each one of these rows and then we can start sewing the rows together. Now that we’ve all the rows sewn together I can start folding them down and attaching them. So I’m just going to fold the top two down and sew them and of course when I sew this together, I’m just going to line up my seam allowances so that they’re facing at opposite directions. We got the top two rows sewn together and I’m going to fold this one down and so this two center row.
The top three rows are sewn together and instead of adding this one to the middle one, what I’m going to do is add the bottom one next to the bottom one and then I’ll sew the final seam after these seams attached. The one thing I do want to watch out for though is these seam allowances have already been sewn in some direction and so when I attach these two I want to pay attention to which way I want this seam allowance to line up with that seam allowance. So if you’re unsure about how to do that, it maybe better to attach these two rows and that way you don’t end up with any cross over seam with your final block.
So now we’ve got the top three in the bottom too and all we need to do is fold this up and so the seam down at the center and then this block is finished. Our Father’s Choice quilt block is all finished and ready for a quilt or wall hanging. The thing that’s pretty cool about this quilt block is that it got so many squares on it. You could take any or all of them and replace them with photos of grandchildren, children, and pets, favorite vacation spots, whatever you want to make it even more personal for the special Father in your life.
I want to wish every father, Happy Father’s Day and this is Penny Halgren from QuiltBlockLibrary.TV and QuiltBlockLibrary.com. If you’re not already there, go to QuiltBlockLibrary.com and get your free download of this pattern and whip it right up for Father’s Day. Thanks for joining me, this is Penny Halgren, peaceful piecing.
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