Regina C Said is the new owner of my extra copy of Kaffe Fasset's Quilt Road. Congratulations, Regina! Please email your shipping address to me at becky@pieceocake.com.

My preferred method of making HSTs is to start with squares. If I want a 2" finish, I cut 2 1/2" squares. Sew two squares together on the diagonal, trim away the excess, press open. Perfect HST. However, there is a lot of wasted fabric. I could sew the cutoff triangles together, but rarely do. 

I made lots of HSTs for my ugly fabric challenge and I didn't have enough of many fabrics to waste. So I tried a very cool ruler designed by Rachel Cross for Creative Grids (my favorite brand of ruler).

You can use one side of this ruler to cut 2 1/2" strips, or do it with another ruler, which is what I did. Because I wanted to work faster, I stacked 6 strips. I paired my strips right sides together so that they were already matched for sewing. FYI – I prewashed and dried my fabric so the triangles stayed stuck together well.

It helps to place the strip stack near a corner of your table (lower right in my photo).

Square off the left side of the strips.

And the right side. The strips need to be the length of the ruler, or shorter. If your strips are shorter, the left end needs to line up with the long side of one of the triangles, as I show in the next photo.

Hold the ruler firmly, keep your fingers out of the way, and cut carefully. If you have stacked strips as I did, be very sure you keep your ruler straight. If you angle it as you cut, triangle sizes will vary.

Being at the corner of your table allows you to hold and cut in the other direction more easily.

Work your way down the ruler.

Separate the stacks of triangles, turn half of them so that you can line up the flat sides as shown. The very pointy edges are away from the ruler.

Carefully place the ruler over the stacks and trim off these dogears.

My Bernina has a little 1/4" mark in front of the feed dogs. I always rely on this mark when piecing. It, together with the edge of my 1/4" foot, help me to sew accurately. 

Control the fabric as you sew.

Even though I sewed carefully, there were still some minor differences in size when I pressed them open. I trimmed some that seemed to really need it but for the rest, I worked with what I had, making minor adjustments as I sewed. Nearly all of my points matched perfectly – yay!

I would use this ruler again. It's fast and there isn't waste. For other quilts, or when I need a different size HST, I would probably start with squares as I have in the past. But it's nice to have one more way to make them! If you are interested in one of these rulers, I have them online here.

(Alert: Be sure to read to the bottom – there's a blog giveaway!)

Contractor Rick is going to start work on the master bath tomorrow. Now, there are a lot of you who will look at our master bath and wonder what is so masterful about it. It's connected to our bedroom which by default makes it the masters' bath 🙂 but it is small by today's standards.

Here's a look in the other direction:

As I said, it's small In fact, our whole house is even smaller than I thought it was. Rick calculated how much flooring we need to order and it looks like the original house plans counted the garage in the total square footage. We're at or under 1700 square feet. You know what? I wouldn't want a bigger house and I'm not just saying that because I'm not going to ever get a bigger house. It's a perfect fit for us.

Later this week the crew is going to scrape the popcorns off the ceilings in the rooms that still have them. Then they will paint those ceilings. In preparation for that, Steve and I have been packing up all of the knick knacks and wall art. I've got the quilts rolled and put away. Most of the cabinets are empty. The whole house is looking (and sounding) bare. It's odd.

As I was moving books to the garage, I weeded them out. If any of you live close enough to Sherman, all but one of these books will be in a garage sale to benefit the Sherman Symphony. There are some very good/expensive-when-I-bought-them books on quilts and quilting, art, color, and design. 

The garage sale will be from 7:30 to noon, Saturday, April 27 at 1202 South Travis, Sherman. I'm guessing there will be a lot of very good buys in addition to my books. 

I held back one book, Kaffe Fassett's Quilt Road, to give away on this blog. I liked it so much I bought two copies! So, leave a comment below and Lorna or I will randomly choose a lucky winner on Wednesday morning. And be watching – I have a few premier issues of Generation Q magazine to give away next!

Have you been crazy busy too? It's nuts, isn't it – how busy we all are? That's why I haven't posted in the last few days. I could go through the litany of what I've been up to: sewing together half square triangles until I could just scream, there's Mom doings, grandkid doings, preparing for the house remodel, you get the idea. The good news is that I am making progress on multiple fronts and am feeling a little less cranky.

I'm going to take the easy way out today and give you links to some great things I've found online. First, a list of 21 beautiful phone apps. I've downloaded some. My favorite is Overgram, which lets you add words to an Instagram image:

While I was sewing the endless string of HSTs, I listened to some excellent TED Talks. This one, by Dan Ariely, is about what motivates us to work. I will remember this.

And the next talk is about how health care ought to be, by Eric Dishman. It caught me as I was worrying about a new spot on my arm. I found out yesterday that it is what my mom calls a 'liver spot'. No worries. But there was a brief period this weekend when I was thinking about melanoma and I really wanted our health care system to be what Mr. Dishman describes.

If you have time, there is a nice group of 8 TED talks, all linked together. Click here. I've listened to half of them and look forward to hearing the rest. Now I am going to sit down and applique for a couple of hours. Oh happy day!

I met with the contractor, Rick, and cabinet maker, Todd, yesterday. It was so nice to plan the cabinet configuration! The basic layout of the kitchen won't change, but the cabinet spaces will. More on that as time goes by.

Rick wants me to choose pretty much everything now. Once it's all in, he'll be able to gut and replace different areas pretty quickly. Shopping… that's doesn't sound bad at all, does it? It's a good thing that 1) I've been thinking about this for a long time and 2) I don't have problems making decisions.

I found the double oven and gas range on Wednesday. Steve looked at them, agreed that they were what he wanted also, and bought them. 

I did more on Wednesday… In our bathroom, we're taking out the tub and replacing it with a walk-in shower. The vanity will be re-built and will be counter-top height. The room is small, I'm keeping the palette light and bright. Here's the tile for the shower walls and floor. The color is more like the top left in the photo – lighter and whiter than it looks in most of the photo.

There will be a 6" band of accent tiles slightly above eye level in the shower. It's a mix of glass and white quartz pieces:

The floor of the shower will be these river rocks that have been flattened:

I think the grout will be a light to medium gray throughout. The vanity top is a very white Silestone, sort of terrazo-looking thing. I don't have the sample any more and failed to take a photo. 

Today I drove to Dallas and found the granite slab for the kitchen. I didn't think I wanted granite. A lot of it is busier than our kitchen could stand. I thought I'd want Corian or Silestone but after seeing friends' kitchens and feeling a variety of countertops, I decided to look at granite to see if I could find a slab that was mostly white with some black. There were a surprising number of choices but this is the one that has my name on it:

This is it from a distance, not a close-up. It looks a little more yellow here than it does in person. I think it's going to look good with the white cabinets and natural hickory floors.

You might wonder where Steve is when I'm doing all this picking. He's happily not joining me as I do it. I am very lucky that he trusts me to make it all look good together. He was only particular about the range and some of the cabinet layout. Being able to make decisions on my own and not 'in committee' absolutely makes this sort of job easier. I like that a lot!

And so is the Applique Caddy! If you haven't seen the video, it tells you all about it. You can order the applique caddy here.

And, of course, the Best-Ever Applique Sampler is on my shelves, ready to ship to you. I'll send a newsletter tomorrow but for now, you know it first! Click here for more.