Waste not, want not -- a sort of tutorial.

I've recently given up trying to do stitch-and-flip triangle corners without drawing a line on the square beforehand. Too many wrong angles, sliding, picking it out and resewing.

One advantage of knowing that your line is very straight is that you can use what you'd be cutting off as waste to make additional half square triangles, unless they are itty bitty -- so waste not, want not!

In the recent block that I did for the Stash Bee, rather large squares are used for the stitch and flip triangles, so the "waste" was also rather large so I was able to make pinwheel blocks from the leftovers. Here's how to do it:

Stitch along the line that you're supposed to sew on for your block:

Now, stitch a half inch from your original line away from the block area -- in the space that you would have otherwise cut off and throw away (the horror!)

Now, cut between these two lines. You can use a rotary cutter, but I just used my big ol' Fiskars. 

The blocks I was making took four units, so you ended up with four "bonus" squares for each block.

I sewed mine into a pinwheel:

Sure, this idea isn't new, but I am really proud of these darling pinwheels!

Happy Tuesday!