What to Do with Leftover Triangles

If you're like me, you probably have a whole bunch of bags of leftover triangles and you think, well what can I do with all these leftover triangles? I have a hard time throwing things away. So from all bunch of different projects I have these leftover triangles that were cut off on the ends of flying geese blocks or snowball blocks, border strips, binding strips. So you've got all these triangles and you're going, what am I gonna do with them? So I'm gonna show you different things you can do with these leftover triangles, a couple quilts that I've made with leftover triangles and how to cut them up and how to use them up so that they're not taking up a lot of space in your quilting room. You can see some of these I've sewn already. And a lot of times, I don't know if you know what a leader is but a leader is when you're sewing, you can start with a strip of fabric that you sew through and then you start sewing your pieces. You can use these leftover triangles as your leader and your ender, so that you're sewing one when you start and sewing another when you finish, so you have all these little triangles that are already sewn together. So they're not all the same size, usually. It doesn't make any difference whether the seam's accurate or not. But usually what I do is I'll take the triangles that I've already pieced, I just take one of my small rulers and I'll square it up to a size that's manageable or a size that fits the half square triangle, just like you would square up any half square triangle. So this one is about an inch and a half, and it's longer on one side than it is, oh, that's an inch and three quarters. I can't even read my own ruler. Okay, so that's an inch and three quarters. So I could cut this at about an inch and three quarters because it does lineup with both of those. It overlaps both of those. So I can go ahead and trim it, trim two sides, turn it around, trim the other side and line it up at an inch and three quarters. And it's ready to sew. And I could do that with all my little triangles that I cut up. Now, some of them are smaller than an inch and three quarters. I might have to change that. So I would probably find the smallest one and then make them all that size. This one, again, I could cut to the inch and three quarters. So you can see, I can do that with all of these little triangles that I had already pieced together. And once I have all of them squared up, I can put them together in a quilt. I can rearrange them in any arrangement I want. I can make flying geese with them. I can do all kinds of things with them. So that's what you can do with the small ones. Sometimes you have bigger pieces. Like these pieces here, I had leftover from a quilt with larger squares on it. And what I would do is, I could either sew it and leave it as a big triangle or I can cut other pieces from it. So say, this is a pretty big sized triangle. It's a little over four inches. So if I wanted to, I could cut inch squares in here or inch and a quarter, inch and a half squares in here. This is an inch and three quarters. So I could do that. Okay, so I have an inch and three quarters, which could go with my inch and three quarters half square triangles and then I could sew these triangles and then cut those into the right size I needed. So you could do that with larger square triangles or you can leave them as big triangles and put them in and combine them with smaller triangles. So you can see I've all these bags. I could do all kinds of fun things with all of these. And they would all have pieces that match. So I could make all kinds of fun quilts with them. Let me show you a couple of my samples of some quilts that I made with leftover triangles. This is one that I made. I'd made a big quilt for a magazine and I had all these little triangles leftover and they're very tiny. So let me show you how little they are. They measure at an three quarters of an inch. So I had these tiny triangles and I thought, well, what should I do with them? These are all triangles. Some of them make flying geese. Some will make a diamond in a square and I put them together and use them up. And I had leftover pieces from the quilt I could use as the border and the binding. And so it made a nice, little miniature quilt. This is another example. This is a quilt that I designed from a large antique quilt that I had, and I had these little antique fabrics, or reproduction fabrics. And I turned it into a square that these are just one inch finished half square triangles and squares. And I just simply quilted it with crosshatching. And it was a pretty fast quilt to put together since the triangles were already together. And so these are a couple ideas that you can do, think about what to do with those little leftover triangles and play with them and see what kind of design you can come up with. You can turn them, you can put squares in them. You can do anything you want with your leftover triangles.