Working With Thangles

  You start with these, Thangles and strips cut 1/2 inch larger than your finished HST's will be.
Lay strips right sides together with the lighter strip on top. This will insure the seam allowance being pressed to the darker fabric. Pin the Thangles paper on, with pins parallel to the sewing lines (dotted lines).
I chain sewed my Thangles, only cutting the first strip off each round to start the next row of stitching. I found they were easier to handle when I didn't cut between them until after I was done sewing.
In this picture you can see that they are all connected at all sewing points, except the first since it was my leader/ender.
Here they are all cut apart into strips and I am cutting the first strip on the solid cutting lines.
Here are the final steps lined up. Press open the HST, leaving the paper on. I had never done any sewing where I had to pull  paper off, so I found it easiest to rip down the center of each triangle and take half of the triangle section off at a time. Once both of those are off, the last bit of paper in the seam allowance comes right off. Now you can flip it over to the right side and there will be one dog ear to cut off.

    So the question remains, what did I think of using them? I found them to be easy to use and very accurate. I know some people have problems with accuracy on HST's, so if that is a problem for you, this could be a solution. I liked not having to cut anything at 7/8 of an inch, and because each strip makes a certain number of HSTs, I found it very easy to keep count. The pinning on of the paper strips seems to take about the same amount of time as drawing diagonal lines on squares which is the only other way I personally have ever done HST's. There was no squaring up to do, because the accuracy was great. I did not care for tearing the paper off, although it did get easier once I found a method that worked for me. Would I use them again? Probably. I don't drive so going out to a LQS frequently to pick up more is not always convenient, nor is always paying $5 a package. I will continue my search for the method of making HST's that will work best for me, but I will probably come back to this method as well. HST's are sometimes tedious, and these did make the process move right along.