Etoile Rouge and Hourglass Units

I mentioned that I am participating in a sew-along called Etoile Rouge, hosted by Kathryn Kerr. You do have to pay to join it, and it started at the beginning of January. She isn't taking any more signups for now but runs the same sew-along every year starting in January. So, if you like the looks of it, mark your calendars to sign up in November or December for next year. 

The idea of the weekly blocks is that each one will be a variation of the Ohio Star block. Which of course, means lots of hourglass blocks (also called quarter-square triangles). 

In today's post, I wanted to discuss two things. One, make sure you have the right fabrics lined up when you sew your hourglass units together. Notice in the photo above, my hourglass units have two red triangles and one triangle each of two different light prints. 

Oops. You see that I combined same light fabrics together rather than one of each light per unit. I'll use them somewhere.

All is not lost, however, because now I want to talk about making the hourglass unit and trimming it down to size. Typically this unit is not made of triangles. Rather, you put two squares right sides together and draw a diagonal line down the center, sew a quarter inch on each side of the line, cut on the line and end up with half-square triangles.  

For the next step, repeat the process with two different half-square triangles.

And there you have your quarter square triangle units or hourglass units. Obviously, if you had combined a red and white hst with a green and white hst, your hourglass unit would have a green and a red triangle rather than two of the same color. 

These images are from The Seasoned Homemaker blog, where she offers a free pdf with instructions.

The thing I wanted to talk about was making the units slightly larger and trimming them down to the correct size after sewing. Kathryn calls for cutting your initial squares one inch larger than the unfinished block unit. My units need to end up 3 1/2 inches unfinished, so I cut all my squares for the hourglass units 4 1/2 inches.  I have heard of cutting them slightly less than one inch and also of cutting them 1 1/4 inches larger than your desired unfinished size. 

After some experimentation, I found that Kathryn was right and that cutting one inch larger was sufficient. 

In the photo, I am using my 3 1/2-inch Cute Cuts trim ruler to cut the hourglass block down to size. You can see I am getting plenty of excess fabric when I trim and that the lines on the ruler are lining up perfectly with the center and the seams of the block unit. You don't need this special ruler, any ruler with diagonal lines could work. What I like about this tool is that the center is clearly marked for the size I am cutting.

This may seem like a long-winded explanation, but for a perfect finished block, the corner seams on the hourglass units must be perfect or things will not line up and will look wonky on your finished block. Notice on my first photo how the inner light triangles are perfectly aligned with the corners of the center block. Making the units larger and trimming carefully allows that to happen.