60 Degree Experiments

Have you ever tried a 60 degree patchwork pattern?

What is a 60 degree pattern? It is a patchwork pattern based upon an equilateral triangle. An equilateral triangle is a triangle that has all equal sides and all equal angles. Because a triangle’s interior angles always add up to 180° and 180 3 = 60 , an equilateral triangle will always have three 60° angles. Clear?

I bought a 60 degree cutting rule a few years back because I like diamond shapes and you can make cool diamond shapes with them. What did I make? A table topper pattern that came with the ruler. One table topper!

Feeling a bit bored (i have a terribly low boredome threshold), I decided to dig out the ‘ole 60 degree ruler and experiment a bit with it. Not wanting to commit myself to a whole quilt’s worth, I decided to make up some table runners with stash fabrics. Table runners are great gifts and we also use runners on our table, so I jumped in.

You can make tiny tringles and diamonds, or nice big ones. Using the 7.5” mark for cutting my triangles made nice roomy pieces for experimenting. Even more fun was sewing strip sets (2.5”, 2.5” amd 3.25”) together and then cutting the triangles. You can create all sorts of geometric shapes with your triangles, which means the toughest part was settling on a layout for my experiments.

To start, I got some holiday themed leftover fabric pieces out and started cutting. I did some fussy cutting of winter birds, to make it more interesting.

I really liked the diamond layout, but did wind up with a wonky one…

With leftover strip set triangles, I made a smaller table runner, about 14″ x 30″. I can always use an extra winter themed runner.

Next, I moved onto a summery colored runner and tried lots of layouts. (Too many!!)

Okay, I am now thoroughly confused! I will have to come back to this one. Sometimes more is too much!

Here are a few tips for using this ruler:

1) Starch! I quickly realized that the bias edges cut with this ruler call for liberal starching of the fabric. Starch before cutting for best results.

2) Pin and pin some more. The you tubers just zip these things together with nary a pin, but I found accurate pinning to be essential for well fitting pieces, especially when using strip sets.

3) Missouri Star Quilts has a nice video showing three different designs for this ruler.

Sometimes we just need to play for a bit and get the sewing mojo flowing!

Happy experimenting!

Lennea