Beginning of February 2019 I was lucky enough to win a copy of the Triangulation Quilt pattern by Claire of Peony and Fern. She had made a pillow based on half rectangle triangles and luckily for the rest of us then decided to make it into a quilt pattern!
I knew I wanted to adapt the quilt pattern into a wall hanging for our living room and figured it was a perfect opportunity to buy and use some of the gorgeous fabrics from Oakshott Cottons. My husband isn’t big on home decorating, but figured he’d be a little more interested if it was based on their set of red shott cottons in their Ruby Red range since it’s his favourite colour. Our living room is many shades of beige (don’t get me started on the beige..) so the red will really stand out!
It was a while before I could start it as I had to finish the Interwoven quilt top I was working on to free up my machine for a new project.
Once the material was cut into rectangles, thank you Stripology ruler for coming in super handy again, I swithered on how to do the rectangles. Briefly considered doing the two at a time half rectangle triangles, but settled on following the pattern for greater variation between rectangles, and mainly to not have to draw a line on a gazillion rectangles!
I chain pieced all the triangles into a long line of what looked like very expensive bunting then headed to the ironing board. I’m not a huge fan of ironing, but it really really makes a difference when quilting, so I’ve begrudgingly started to care about it. To be honest, I’m glad I’m not doing the full quilt size as I probably would have put it away and pretended it didn’t exist for a long time after sewing the triangles together. The smaller triangles are a little bit of a pain, but I did manage to power through and get them done in a couple ironing sessions.
Once they were all ironed back into rectangles with the seams open, I set about trimming them to the size specified in the pattern. I recommend having the right height ruler at least as trimming one side then trying to line up the other took a while on the bigger ones. Luckily I had a small square ruler the right height for the small rectangles so lined them up with the points on an edge and trimmed top and bottom at the same time. My edges weren’t exactly perfect on all of them, but I figured it was a little wiggle room when sewing them into a line and trying to match points so I only trimmed the sides if they were out by more than 1/8″.
Once they were all trimmed I sewed them together into pairs trying to avoid having the same colours together in a row and back to the ironing board I went. This is a theory I read where this lady was saying how she made things random. (Can’t remember the source sorry!!) She sewed things in pairs by either matching or avoiding colours, then sewed those pairs together using the same theory and so on till she had bigger sections she could move about. I did this with my rectangles as I didn’t want to lay them all out and have to keep track of which was supposed to go where for individual rectangles. It worked well for me! Think there was only one I decided to unpick and match with a different pair due to where they had to be placed to keep colours even.
Once my top was all pieced together I had to figure out how to quilt it. I made my husband come in and give suggestions even though he’s not a quilter and we decided on a larger simple design. I was tempted to do one inch lines echoing out from the single solid triangle I wanted to feature, but settled on stitch in the ditch along the large triangles echoing the direction of the feature triangle. Around the feature triangle I did some zig zag stitching just for a little interest. And may go back in the future and add some hand stitching on a triangle or two if I get bored with the simple quilting on it. Hand stitching is easy to add after it’s been bound though, so didn’t want to rush into that before I knew I wanted it.
We’re still yet to actually hang it up properly centered on our wall! It’s hanging up on the wall, but the two hooks on the wall weren’t quite in the right place.
I added a couple of pockets on the corners and another two spaced out in the middle of the wall hanging so that it would hang evenly. We still need to get the right points up on the wall to hang it from, even months later!
Thanks for reading to the end! Hope you enjoyed my take on my Triangulation wall hanging! I’ve made a coordinating pillow, and plan to add three more using fabric from our holiday, so will try to get that up as a separate post at some point.
Pattern: Triangulation Quilt by Claire Vogeley