Week 9 of 52 Weeks of Hot Pads | Flying Geese Half Square Triangles (HST)

Welcome to the 9th week post of the 52 weeks of hot pads / quilted pot holders.

Here are the list of past week’s posts in this 52 Weeks of Hot Pads Challenge:

I thought it would be a great challenge for me to do a pot holder a.k.a hot pads every single week of 2019.

I am planning on having it displayed in my kitchen. They make great decor don’t they?

While I am at it, I am going to be sharing with you a simple tutorial on the process.

You can join in the challenge and make the same hot pads I make every week with the same design or any of your own choice.

For this week, I decided to jump into my scrappy basket again.

This time into my ready-cut 5″ charms.

I have stacks of ready cut 1.5″ ,2.5″, 3.5″ and 5″ fabrics. Most of them from leftover scraps of previous projects or some of those fabrics I feel like isn’t much of my taste.

I love the fact that I am pretty organised with my scraps- making it easy and resistance free to use. I am not always like this, but in the past year, I have gotten the perfect organisation technique with this process I talked about HERE> in this post.

Can you spot the latest finish?? Oh, I just love the wall already. They are going to be full of hot pads by the end of this project. Can you imagine?

Please pin the image and spread the words. It’ll be a fun one to join along.

Flying Geese HST Hot Pad Tutorial

There are affiliate links within this post. Please find the full disclosure here.

For this tutorial, I am going to use the 8 HSTs technique. Which means from the two 5″ charms square, we can get 8 2″ HST. So here’s how I do it.

First, select your choice of charm squares. I chose 8 pieces of dark value, and 8 pieces of light value. Pair dark value one with low value to get enough contrast. I am picking these from my pre-cut scraps.

2. Place the charm pairs right sides together. Mark both diagonal lines across the squares. I would recommend testing out one pair first before we do this on all of the other pieces.

3. Sew 1/4″ away from the drawn lines on both sides and both diagonal directions.

4. Cut along the marked lines and halfway along the sides. You want to make sure you’re cutting through the centre and your ruler is aligned with one of the edge – here I am aligning the bottom side with one of the horizontal line on my ruler. And I am making sure I am cutting the rough the centre where the stitches intercept.

I love my rotating mat for this! You can find one similar HERE>

There you go, now you have cut into 8 little pieces. Each of these should opens up into a HST unit which roughly measures 2- 2 1/4″ in size. We shall trim them to a perfect 2″ later. I love trimming as this improves my piecing and it results in a more accurate clean block.

Related Post : 6 ways to improve piecing in quilting

4. Now let’s prep all the others. I like to chain-piece these. Chain piecing saves up so much time and it is very therapeutic.

I decided to mark using the gel tip pen for more clarity.

5. Repeat step 4 for all the pieces. And press them. Aren’t they cute?

6. At this stage, find a comfy seat or stand well at your cutting table, and using the rotating mat again and the ruler, trim the edges away so that you’ll end up with a perfect 2″ square HSTs.

Tips: I recommend changing the blade before doing the many, many cuts. It’ll save your sanity and makes it so much easier. Here is my choice of blade – as I often change them, I find these are perfect on a budget.

Trimming HSTs will also be much more easier with these Rulers. They keep the rulers right on the diagonal line, so no shifting about while you’re trimming and turning.

7. Play around with the layout. Since I am aiming for the look to have the flying geese look, they are arranged on point. They are going to be pieced 5 in a row and 5 rows altogether. You will have extra pieces if you started with 16 pieces of charm squares.

8. Chain piece the HST into rows together. Then rows together into the final top. Press well.

Time to practice you quilting skill..

9. Baste and quilt as you wish.

I always, always recommend people to practice their skills on little projects like these. They don’t go to waste and you’ll get satisfaction to continue on practicing.

This time, I opt for a straight line quilting this time with my walking foot instead of practicing as I rarely do this and I needed to practice more of that.

For more quilting ideas with the walking foot, check out this class.

8. Trim the edges, and bind it! Don’t forget to put the hook before binding.

I am using the usual 2.5″ fold in half. From the back of the quilt, I align the raw edges of the binding tape to the trimmed quilted piece. Then, I sew a 1/4″ away from the edge.