A half-translation surface is a surface equipped with aflat Riemannian metric with finitely many cone-type singularities, and a system of charts to R2 valid away from the cone points such that all transition maps between charts are translations or rotations by π. The moduli space of such surfaces comes equipped with a family of locally definedEuclidean metrics, which can be pieced together to form a Euclidean metric for which the Teichmüller geodesic flow has hyperbolic properties.We describe how to build quasiconformal maps between nearby half-translation surfaces surfaces in order to estimate the Teichmüller distance between the underlying Riemann surface structures. In particular, we show thatthe projection from the moduli space of unit area half-translation surfaces (with the Euclidean metric) onto Teichmüller space (with the Teichmüller metric) is Hölder on every compact set.