Flying Geese

This was a sew-along last year by Sheryl at Temecula Quilt Co. that I failed to follow along with at the time, but got interested in after the fact. What got me interested is when my friend Brenda (who did follow along) showed me her quilt, and my heart nearly stopped. It was (and is) gorgeous! I knew I had to start making geese right away.

I started out using some pre-cuts I had on hand, which had started out 6" wide, but shrunk of course, when I washed them. So I made my geese to finish at 4 1/2" rather than the 5" as I desired. No big deal. I also dug into my scrap bin and got quite a few geese out of there. However I wasn't entirely thrilled with the resulting flock, which looked kind of a mess. (to be fair, the above photo was taken at night, under the ceiling light, which makes it look really warm and rather ghastly, imo)

I decided to take a little more control over the colors, and limit my choices to a palette that was more pleasing to my eye. Blues and browns, tans, grays and creams (but no "white"whites) purples, and blacks. Much better, methinks. (And what a difference natural daylight makes in the photo.) Some of the pre-cuts and scraps still worked, but now the geese were mostly coming out of my main stash. Which isn't a bad thing..

This is the method of construction I decided on, which yielded two geese for each pair of 5 1/2" squares.

I used my "Angler 2" which eliminated the need to draw lines through the squares, and sped things up considerably.

If you look closely, you can see how you position the needle at the top corner. The bottom corner follows the middle line on the Angler (previous photo), as you stitch.

Trim, press out, and repeat on the other side. And don't throw those waste triangles away. I call them bonus triangles, and have already sewn a bunch of them into hourglass blocks and triangle squares (for another yet-undetermined project ~ ).

After auditioning a few layout ideas, I ended up using a random placement, with all the geese flying in the same direction.

I didn't want this to be a copy of my friend's quilt though, so I had to do something to make it "mine" if you know what I mean, so I arranged some of the geese to make top and bottom borders.

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any civilized way to sew this together to end up smooth. I snipped and cajoled, swore, and pressed the hell out of everything, but in the end the intersections will not lay flat, and are pretty much a holy mess.  Oh, well.


 I happen to have been hoarding saving a couple large pieces that look like they might make good backing fabric for this quilt.  I don't have quite enough of the larger-scale print, but I really like it so might combine the two in some way. I should figure it out soon (tonight?) so I can get it basted and start the quilting.


Meantime, I washed (or more accurately, soaked and rinsed) some of the smallest scraps of the indigo (previous post) with no bleed issues. After they dried, I pressed them, then went ahead and made three tiny little 9-patches.
  

Yes I'll definitely be making more of these, enough for a cute little mini!


love,
Sandy