Sunday, April 1, 2012

Equilateral Triangles Part 2

I didn't realize when I posted yesterday that their would be a part 2, my mind got to thinking and more ideas came so I thought I should test out some more theories.

First I decided to add just strips (2½") all around the triangle. I figured that there must be some kind of simple math for figuring out the length of the side strips. At first I thought it was as simple as adding the amount of the little setting diamonds at the points 2½" unfortunately this was too much  by a ¼". So instead each side increased by 2¼" Making the side strips 8¼" , 10½" , and 12¾".
So this is how it turns out.  For these sides I tried my idea yesterday of folding my strips in half to cut both 60° angles at once. See below.
After making several of these I thought there must be a quicker easier less work way of doing this for chain sewing. So I took a long strip(making sure it was extra long since I was using scraps) and only trimmed my 60° angle at one end. Then I sewed it to my triangle starting with the 60° end; which would leave a big tail at the end of my single block but perfect if you wanted to sew several at once with a long strip of fabric.
Now I just took my ruler with the 60° angle marking on it and lined it up and cut. This was actually easier than cutting out each individual piece; which if you accidentally cut wrong could be devastating.

Now I know what you're thinking "kinda like a log cabin, right" I was thinking the same thing, triangle log cabins. So next I decided to try adding another ring of strips and it came out like this.
I think with different fabrics on each side it would have a more log cabin effect but I haven't tried this, not enough of the same scraps left to try. Another thing I noticed for all the math minds out there is that for the 4th and 5th strips added the strips were still increased by 2¼" making them 15" and 17¼". However with the 6th strip(and the final measurement of one side) it came out to 19 and 5/8" just 1/8" more than it would have been in the sequence. I think if you want to try and make a super triangle and just keep adding rings of strips to one base triangle then you better do the strip piecing method so you don't run into any shortages; because even an 1/8" can throw off your entire project by the end.

Thanks for reading♥