triangle peaks quilt – Monday Morning Designs

Two years ago I made a blue and orange Triangle Peaks quilt for my daughter and had since planned to make myself one with red and green fabric—I guess all those triangles got me thinking about Christmas trees. So here it is, my last quilt for 2020 (of 14 total).

Last year I ordered this lovely bundle of red happiness specifically for this quilt. I used only half of the fat quarters by excluding the richest reds and replacing them with reds that were more in line with the lighter ones in the bundle.

For the background, I used Art Gallery’s Loved to Pieces Frost Topiary. This fabric isn’t completely white, it actually has a frosty hue and the tiny topiary trees are so cute! I thought a different type of tree would give this year’s Christmas quilt a different twist. The accent triangles are Kona Cotton Sage green, which BTW took around nine MONTHS to get! Pandemic online fabric ordering has been quite the experience. Lastly, the backing is Andover Fabric’s Teal Yuletide Holly accented with pretty gold metallic.

Triangle Peaks, by Emily Dennis, is one of the fastest makes out there. While it takes a while to cut the fabric (doesn’t it always?) there’s very little to do to make blocks. The large cut triangles are the main ‘block’ and the smaller triangles are simply sewn to the background. There are biased edges, but with so little to sew handling them sparsely is a given.

And chain piecing is always fast…

As always, choosing a layout is time consuming for me, I think I might tend to overthink it. Once the layout was determined, sewing the rows went quickly. Sewing the rows together to finish the top took quite some time, mainly due to pinning.

My absolute most dreaded part of quilting is cutting threads off the back. I will find every other non-related chore to do to avoid doing it. But, since this quilt has mostly biased edges that don’t fray, trimming was a cinch.

I decided to straight line quilt so pin basting was pretty intense. After my Quilting Disaster! I’m diligent about using plenty of pins. Lines were quilted 2″ apart giving it a clean, simple finish.

I used the remaining yard of the sage green for the binding to match the accent triangles.

After attaching my binding to the quilt and before sewing it down completely, I always give it a press. I find this helps it lie flat and makes it a bit easier to stitch down. 🙂

The holiday themed backing makes it complete.

And here it is!

Yet another festive quilt for the holidays. Merry Christmas!

When I saw the Triangle Peaks quilt made by Emily Dennis I knew I needed to make one for myself. Lately I’ve been using fabric I have on hand, which isn’t a whole lot and is probably considered a relatively small stash for a quilter, but I was determined to make this pattern using what I had.

A couple of years ago, with another project in mind, I purchased a 12-piece Kona Cotton fat quarter bundle entitled Pool Party. This lovely collection offered a range of blues and aquas from light to dark with a few deep blue-greens mixed in.

While I don’t consider myself a ‘blue’ person, I really took a liking to this combination. And since that particular project never came to fruition, I pulled my fabric and set out to make my version of a Triangle Peaks quilt. To compliment the blues, I decided on Kona Cotton Mango for my ‘accent’ color (the small triangles) which I did have to purchase, along with backing fabric.

This was my first time working with triangles, which I enjoyed, but bear in mind if you make anything with triangles every one has two bias edges that are prone to stretching if you’re not careful.

I completed the accent triangles first then everything else was ready to sew together. For me, deciding on the layout was the most difficult part. I used only nine of the twelve colors of blue which was enough to spread them out evenly, but it still took some time to make sure the like-colors were far enough away from one another.

Once the top was finished it was time for quilting. If you’ve read my blog posts in the past you know I don’t exactly love the quilting aspect. If I could afford it I would have just about everything longarmed! But since I can’t, I end up doing quite a bit myself.

Since this quilt is so modern and angular, I felt the quilting needed to softened it up. That said, I decided on vertical lines using my serpentine stitch. Maybe subconsciously I thought it would give it a wavy, watery feel. 🙂

After sewing my basting stitches across the top (to help reduce shifting and pulling) I started quilting from the middle then to the right, marking lines every 1 ¾” with a hera marker. This process took forever! But I admit, I’m pretty slow.

Once all the 1 ¾” lines were finished, I used my guide to quilt the lines in between. This saves time from marking rows, and it works well, my lines were fairly accurately spaced.

IMGP9037 — Quilting with Aurifil thread 2026/Chalk

I think the serpentine stitch was a great choice.

It ended up that I didn’t mind quilting this one at all. I kind of went into auto pilot mode, just plugging away row after row. It took me more hours than I could count but I love the results.

I used Kona Cotton Mango for the binding.