Striped Fabric Trick

Last month I taught a demo on using black and white fabrics at the Dragonfly Quilt Shop in Watkinsville, GA. I talked a little about using striped fabrics to make beautiful and simple blocks. When cutting the striped fabric for the block, use an isosceles triangle (for those of us who are years away from math classes, that's a 60, 60, 90 degree triangle), which is basically a 1/4 square triangle. Line up the longest side of your triangle with one line on the stripe and cut 4 triangles. If you want a block that looks the same on all sides, cut all four triangles with the longest side on the same line. If you'd rather save on fabric, you can cut the triangles as shown in the above photo. Cutting them this way will mean that only the opposing sides will be the same in your block...

I made the pillows (below) years ago, but they are some of my favorite. Sure wish I could find a stripe as wonderful as this fabric again. Both pillows were made from the same fabric, but I placed the long side of the triangle on different stripes for each pillow. Because each pillow block is symmetric, you can tell that I cut 1/4 square triangles on the same stripe of the fabric. You can get two blocks using the fabric-saving method by cutting the 4 lower triangles on one stripe and do the same with the 4 upper triangles. Does that wording make sense? If not, let me know and I'll blog with pictures and another description.