I had originally planned to do a square block before tackling this one, but I was going to be on the road a week later and triangles are harder to travel with. So, I decided to do this one quickly before I left town, and then take a square block with me when I traveled.

It seemed like a great plan at the time, but of course I didn’t get anywhere close to finishing this one in the first week, and ended up taking it with me on my trip after all.

Most of the little triangles in this block were cut out as quarter-square triangles (where you start with a square and cut diagonally across it in both directions to create four triangle pieces). Boy, was it nice to be able to rotary cut some pieces for a change, after all the oddball-shaped pieces I’d been cutting out lately.

Quilters today are so spoiled with their rotary cutters. When Jane Stickle made this quilt in the 1860s, I imagine she had to cut all her pieces out with primitive 19th century templates … and probably by candlelight to boot.

The little triangles went together pretty quickly, but by then it was time to catch my flight. I scrambled to finish cutting out the rest of the pieces and pack my travel kit.

Taking quilting projects on an airplane presents some extra challenges. The TSA never seems that interested in my pins and needles (I take a handful of each, pinned on the inside of my travel kit). Of course, I leave my rotary cutter at home. It’s the scissors that I worry about – I need them on the trip, and I can easily make do with smaller scissors that meet the TSA requirements … but I’m not about to take my nice Gingher embroidery scissors and risk getting them confiscated.

In my rush, I actually left home without any scissors in my travel kit this time. Once I arrived at my destination, I stopped at Walgreens to see if I could pick up some reasonably-priced small scissors to tide me over till I got home. They had plastic-handled kids’ scissors for $3.99, pictured below:

You can see I was quilting in style in Las Vegas, on my marble work surface. That is just water in the rocks glass, by the way. Don’t drink and stitch, folks – it’s dangerous.

While the drugstore scissors were fine for snipping threads, they weren’t really up to the task of cutting fabric. Before my next flight, I’ll need to find some small scissors that are sharp enough, but not as special as my old-school German-made Ginghers.

In the meantime, I was very thankful that I’d precut the rest of the pieces for this block before I left on this Thanksgiving-week trip, because those cheap scissors were not doing the job.

I like to travel light, so I didn’t bring my larger triangle ruler either. Before I left, I wrote down the heights of all the “rows” of this triangular block, so I could make sure that I was on track with the size of the block. Since I didn’t have a ruler as long as the completed triangle, I made a makeshift T-square ruler out of three smaller ones (4″x4″, 1″x6″, and 2.5″x2.5″). It worked pretty well, and I was able to determine that the block was the correct shape and size:

With inadequate scissors and no pieces cut out for the next block, the project ground to a temporary halt. However, that didn’t mean I wasn’t furthering my quilting obsession, finding quilting inspiration in this cool pattern on a wall at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas:

While I didn’t make as much Dear Jane progress as I’d planned to on the trip, I did complete this triangle block, and was quite pleased with my tool improvisation efforts. Just think how much progress I can make now that I’m at home with all my tools again!