Candy Shop - part one

To start off the new year properly I've started a new quilt, this one isn't going to be as big as the previous ones (it should end up 52"/130cms square) so I'm hoping I can get it done a bit quicker, yeah right!

Anyway it's called Candy Shop and is from this lovely book

I love most of the quilts out of this book, but I think this is the first one that I've actually attempted to do.

The central part of this pattern is made up of 16 sections of what they call broken dishes pattern. This means cutting out a square, tipping it on it's side and then sewing 4 triangular pieces to each diagonal edge which then makes one larger square section (you can partly see the example on the photo above). Do this 16 times and you have the central square of the quilt done.
I decided to do this section in a different way. I've heard that cutting triangles can be quite a head scratcher at times and this pattern calls for 64 of them to be cut. So I thought I could use the knowledge gained when we did the pin wheel one at my quilting group. A friend of mine, Wend, asked me at the time how we made it so I'm going to try and explain it now.

So to start off with I cut all the squares needed for the outer border section of the quilt along with the 16 creamy white squares for the centre section. So then I cut squares of fabric that would eventually be my quarter square triangles. I wasn't sure what size to cut them but since the cream squares that they'll be lining up to were 5.5" I decided to cut out 16 fabric squares of 6.5" thinking that'd I'd probably have to trim them down to size at the end.

Taking two 6.5" squares (of different materials) and laying them on top of each other, putting the right sides together. Once pinned together, I then drew a straight line from one corner to another. Then added two more lines, one either side, 1/4 of an inch from the initial line.

Then you sew down the two outer lines

cut down the centre line to make two triangles.

Open these out and iron them flat, and you should have two sets of half square triangles stitched together.

Now if you laid two of these new squares on top of each other, putting the right sides together, pinning them and then drawing the three straight lines down them as before, from one non-stitched corner to another,

Sewing down the two outer drawn lines

and cutting down the centre to leave two triangles.

After opening them up and ironing them flat, you will now have a set of quarter square triangles all ready to go.
Make up nine of these squares then trim them down to make them all 5.5" square. When it came to this point I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't have to trim off that much here, it was mainly clipping off the 'dog ears' that were sticking out over the edge of the squares and straightening up the odd edge here and there.

Now make up 6 squares only to the half square triangle stage and slice in half (from one non-stitched corner to the other), creating 12 triangles made up of two fabrics stitched together.

Once you've done this it's just a simple case of laying them down in the pattern that you want, including the plain cream/white ones and stitching them together in rows. Then you stitch the rows together, adding a triangle to each corner, and hey presto! - you have the centre square panel completely done.

The way that I've just described it probably sounds quite convoluted but in actual fact this is very easy to do. The results are pretty good, and bear in mind that I have done all this in just two nights sat in front of the TV!