Learn the Basics of Thangles

Video Transcript

JEANETTE WHITE: Hi. I'm Jeanette White for Expert Village and Piper's Quilts & Comforts located in Salt Lake City in Sugarhouse. Today, we're going to be talking about a better way to do half square triangles and they're called thangles. Thangles come in half inch increments starting at one half inch and going up to six inches, and you can accomplish anything that has a half square triangle with a thangle, and it's going to give you a whole bunch of advantages. One them is, is that when you are operating on this diagonal seam that goes across this way, it's biased and the property of that grain is that it stretches. The problem when you do it the old traditional way of taking squares, cutting them in half and diagonally, and then reconfiguring the colors together is that when you stitch this line, it stretches. And then your points don't line up. So, we're going to do thangles today and it's a lot of fun. To begin with, you're going to decide how big you want your square to be done in the end. Then, you're going to purchase the thangle, and we have these here at Piper's, in whatever the dimension is that you want this square to be finished. Now, you don't have to add any seam allowance to this, they've already done it for you. So I've chosen my thangle here, and this one is 2.5, this one is 4. So my finished square would be 4 inches with this one, 2-1/2 inches with this one. The ones we're going to be doing today are 1-1/2 inches, and to get this prepared you're going to cut strips and you do not need to be terribly accurate about this. You can even eyeball the cutting. The only thing you need to do is have your strips, your dark and your light be just a little bit wider, and this one is kinda generous here, I could have gone a little bit narrower, but a little bit wider than what the thangle itself is. And I'm going to lay the dark one down first face up, then I'm going to put right sides together with the light one on top, and then I'm going to pin my thangle on here, here, here and here, just the way I've done here. Now, you want to do this assembly line. So figure out how many half square triangles you need and then how many per sheet, and then you're going to prepare all of them at one time. In our next segment, we will be stitching these.

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