How about some more chevrons with easy cutting and assembling?

But first, continuing with a previous post, let me just show you how the diamonds/chevron shape would change with an angle of your cut:

Pretty self-explanatory, right?

OK, now onto our main topic: Let’s say you want to do some chevrons that are “stacked together”, not separated by strips (like I did with my pillowcase #1). A good example is this quilt, by Tag Fur Tag:

Using the cutting technique I showed above (and described in more detail before), we could cut up some rectangles in different colors and stack them up… something like this:

Not too bad, but look at all the seams we need to do to sew these up. And I particularly don’t like those “bias” seams. OK, so hear me out. We will use a technique similar to half square “triangles”, to get these diamonds/chevrons. (I will call them triangles, but they will be triangles only if you cut diagonally across the rectangle.)

Start with two rectangles and draw in the cutting line like this (note that the lines are at the same “slant” for both pieces; it is important here to keep track of this direction – this will be clear later):

Next, match the two lines on the rectangles (both triangles facing in):

It is important to lay them like this – if you simply put one rectangle over the other, you would get two “kites” instead of two rectangles – which is what I did to make my Tolva quilt). Now, sew 1/4 in on both sides of the line, cut along the line and press open:

As you can see, you have one half of a chevron there in the middle. The drawback of this method is that you have to do some planning before sewing these pairs, because you will be sewing together adjacent rows.

Therefore, this is what you get with that one pair of rectangles. How do you make a full chevron?

Cut out another pair, but now draw the line with the opposite “slant”. This is important because these are rectangles and if you cut them differently, you will get different “triangles” – right and left. If you cut them the same, you will not be able to stack them into chevrons.

Repeat the sewing steps. And you can arrange your rectangles like this:

These two need to really be in one row, but that was impossible to photograph. These make one row, two half chevrons. to finish the chevrons (say the striped part), you need to repeat the two steps but now pair that fabric with the fabric that will be in the row above. Therefore, to make a row of two chevrons (like the example quilt above) you will need 4 rectangles of each fabric, except the first and the last half row).  With this method, you will always end up with two chevrons. I am already working on pillowcase #2 using these fabrics: