I have been working a bit on the half square triangles I will need for the 4th border blocks in the Border of the Month sew-along Corey Yoder is hosting. Corey always does a YouTube video demonstrating each step of her sew-alongs, and in this latest video, she showed a new trim tool for making half square triangles. I highly recommend that you click the link and watch the video: it is so interesting!

The tool is called Slotted Trimmers, and you get two sizes in the package. One for unfinished HSTs in half-inch sizes (2.5 inches through 6.5 inches) and the other for unfinished HSTs in even sizes. I needed 3.5″ HSTs, so I used Trimmer A, with half-inch measurements. Notice two things in the photo. First, do you see the slots that run up the two short sides of the triangle? Those are so you can cut off your dog ears as you trim.
Second, there are dotted lines and solid lines across the ruler. You will line the seam of your HST along the dotted line and trim the two short sides. And the dog ears.
The beauty of this is that you only have to make two cuts rather than four cuts as you would with other trim methods.

Here is a close-up of my placement and trimming. You are measuring from the seam line, not the bottom cut edge. The reason I wanted to try this tool is that all these HSTs have to be pressed open (I know), and making just two cuts instead of four appealed to me. The BlocLoc wouldn’t have worked because you have to press the seams in one direction for that tool.

I could have used a 3.5″ ruler to trim, but then I would have had to make four cuts. I think the slotted trim tool is a time saver, particularly if you press open and have a ton of HSTs to make. I found it to be very accurate.

The other thing I had to do was figure out my color placement, since I have decided to do a controlled color placement with my scraps. There was a quilter on the Coriander Quilts Facebook group who posted her diagram, which inspired me to do one of my own.

I am having fun with this project and hope to sit and sew HSTs to my heart’s content over the next few days. I need to make 80 of them.

My retina specialist gave me some great news when I saw him on Tuesday. He said my eyes have improved with the Eyelea injections so much that I will soon move to having injections every eight weeks instead of every four! The bad news is that my insurance company has decided they are done paying the full price of these injections (($2000 per eye). They will pay some, but I am going to have to pay $500 per injection, per eye until January. This was unexpected.