Are you making a quilt pattern with snowball corners (aka stitch-n-flip) and wondering how to get the most of those cut-off corners? This one simple hack will save you time and extend the life of those corners by giving you an opportunity to use them in another project!
Do This One Thing to Save Your Corners
When making snowball corners (aka the stitch-n-flip method), the corner is cut off of two pieces of fabric that have been stitched together resulting in two triangles that either end up in the trash or need to be sewn together to make something useful.
If you’re like me, you hate to see any precious fabric go to waste. By doing this one extra step when making your snowball corners, you can extend the life of those extra pieces of fabric and turn them into another project easily.
The extra step?
Sew an extra seam ½ inch to the outside of your already sewn snowball corner seam.
You can mark the line or just eyeball it once you have done it several times (just be sure if you’re eyeballing you err on the side of overestimating - vs. underestimating- your ½ inch so your seam allowance doesn’t become too narrow).
Once you’ve stitched your extra seam ½ inch from your original snowball corner seam, just trim in between the two seams and voilà ! You now have both your snowball corners AND Bonus Half Square Triangles. To save time, I line up all my seams on a line on my cutting mat and trim all the corners at once as shown below.
The result?Â
Extra already sewn half square triangles ready to be trimmed and used in another project.
Either save them as you go to make one big HST quilt someday or use them in smaller projects such as bags, totes or pillows.
I've shared two examples of projects I've used bonus HSTs for below.
These particular Bonus HSTs were from my Soccer Party Quilt and I used them to make sawtooth stars on this Byron Backpack I took with me to QuiltCon in 2023. I loosely followed the pattern for the construction of this backpack and added this fun patchwork layout and I love how it turned out!
You can also keep it simple with a random layout of Bonus HSTs like I used to make the All The Things Tote. These HSTs were leftover from a throw size quilt I made a few years ago.
Have you tried this yet? If you have, I'd love to know your favorite way to use your Bonus HSTs.
Until next time, friend!