Triangle Magic

For the latest quilt I need to make 384 half square triangles and I wasn't looking forward to that part of it.  That is a lot of marking and sewing and cutting to use the method where you sew 1/4" from both sides of the middle of a square.  Then I remembered someone on a message board writing about a program that she has where you print a sheet of whatever size finished triangles you need.  I didn't know what the program was and searching came up with Thangles.

Thangles are pre-printed strips of paper that you lay on top of the two fabrics you want to make the HSTs out of, sew on the lines and cut them apart. That wasn't exactly what I was looking for, to have to buy different packages for different sizes. 

After some more searching I found the Triangle Magic program from Quilt-Pro Systems.  I purchased, downloaded, and installed it.  I printed one sheet of 1 1/4" finished size triangles and used some scrap fabric to do a test.  It came out pretty good.  Better than good. 

I cut a strip of CW fabric, a strip of Ivory, and cut a printed page into three strips with each strip having 8 HSTs. Probably not even 10 minutes later I had 8 HSTs sewn, cut and pressed.  That's enough HSTs for one block.

Now that is a usefull tool!