Friday, October 18, 2013

Oh, It Does Work

Its cold and rainy today.  I'm supposed to be off today, but I ventured into work to be sure My Guy didn't have to face today's lunch time trivia competition on his own.  The rest of our 4 person team is off today and he'd have been on his own.  We didn't win, but we held our own, hopefully we are still in second place after today's round. 

I've spent the rest of the day watching over Drama Teen who had her wisdom teeth out yesterday.  She's doing pretty well.  I was going to post a picture of her from yesterday showing how out of it she was, and then decided that really wasn't fair.  She's hurting more today then she did yesterday, so I brought home some new movies for this afternoon to help her keep her mind off of it.  So far she's taken a couple of Tylenol tablets, but none of the pain medication the doctor prescribed for her.  Thanks for all the well wishes 


In between reminding DT to take her antibiotic and making sure she has something that she can actually eat without really eating, I've been upstairs stitching.  Last year one of my goals was to make a quilt using one of my specialty rulers.  I've got a whole rack of those "special" rulers that pretty much just gather dust. I have good intentions, but for some reason, I never get around to learning how to use any of them. Well that was true up until last month.  The blocks in my Christmas Angels quilt use 4.5 inch Triangle in a Square blocks.  I was contemplating making all 48 blocks I needed by paper piecing them, but that didn't sound like a lot of fun.  I was reorganizing the sewing room one afternoon and found this.  


I struggle with templates, so I wasn't sure these rulers would work.  But I gave it a go.  I cut out my triangles using the ruler on the right and made the side triangles from 3" x 6" rectangles.

  
Then starting assembling the blocks.


You line up the cut off tip of the equilateral triangle with the first right triangle.  Stitch and then line up the second right triangle with the the tip created by the first.


Finally you use the ruler with the triangle traced on it to trim the block. 


Repeat that 48 times and one has all the Triangle in a Square blocks needed for a whole quilt.


I like these two little rulers.  I have no clue where I came across this ruler set, but the The Quilt in a Day web page shows they are available for order .  So not quite a year later, I finally met my 2012  goal of using at least one of my specialty rulers.  Maybe I need to pick out another one from the rack and design a quilt using it.  Sounds like a goal for next year.  

4 comments:

Kevin the Quilter said...

Glad DT is on the road to recovery! I love all of the Quilt In A Day rulers and templates I have. I find them to be very accurate. Glad you were able to use your's with success also!

Denise in PA said...

I have SO many specialty rulers still in the wrapping! I should make the same resolution! Hope your daughter feels all better soon! I remember when mine went through the same thing a few years ago (and me, MANY years ago - LOL!)

thea said...

Before I started quilting, I got a couple of specialty rulers because I thought I needed them for quilting (I wanted to be a quilter). I haven't used them yet. Way to do something new, even if that isn't this month's 15 minute challenge topic. Hope DT is doing even better .. so painful.

Bonnie said...

Congrats on using a specialty ruler. Last year, or was it the year before? I decided to us my X Block ruler. I really like how it looks but e gads you waste a lot of fabric. I think I'll review my other rulers and see which one I can use next year. Good inspiration here.