“Zig Zag Wave Cushion” Project Quilting 3:6

The last challenge of season three was to play with zig zags. I had seen zig zags made with half square triangles and thought it looked pretty fun. I also just got a hand-me-down charm pack (Thank you, Veronica!) so I decided to use it for this challenge.  Lastly, I had seen this video from Missouri Star Quilt Company about how to make half-square triangles from charms….that’s how it all started.

I chose a nice chocolate brown with white pindot fabric for the background, cut it into 5″ squares and stacked one with each of my charms. Before I even knew what I was going to make, I sewed together a huge stack of charms, trimmed into half square triangles. Then I just started arranging!! It was pretty fun, playing with designs, switching up the colors, moving around the blocks …then at one point the arrangement on my design wall was about the size of our wooden entry way bench, voila! I went running into my living room with a stack of triangles and they did look pretty good in the room. We have lots of brown, but its also a very colorful and very quilty room.

I knew I couldn’t leave it at just half-square triangles for a Project Quilting challenge…so I added a little spunk with ric rac, ribbon and quilting in waves right over the top of the zig zags. It was a little harsh, so this softened it up a little and obscured the crazy eye tricks the pindots were playing with me. I like the results and my family does too! So I was not only able to get another Project Quilting Challenge done in a week, I dressed up a piece of furniture in our living room too!

Oh and I tried to take a photo of the bench without Brennan, but he just really wanted to be in all the pictures! (I had to crop him out of the first two!)

Ok, I’m not sure if I should tell you this, because I think you’ll have to try it for yourself to decide…I’m not sure if I like that charm square/half square triangle technique! It was really fun and easy to whip through a whole lot of fun triangles, BUT, there’s a big BUT! If you follow that method, you end up with all four sides of your HST as bias edges. So they say, be careful with them. But I did feel like I was super careful and I still ended up with a pretty ripply end product. The wavy embellishments kind of obscure it, but of course, I still see the puckers and it bugs me a little. Maybe sometimes it will be worth the speedy results, but for important projects, I wouldn’t use this method. Just think of that before you start sewing together your very favorite charm pack, that’s all.