Migration

When we hear the word migration we think of birds and particularly geese, flying south for the winter.  Flying geese is a very traditional quilt block which can be fiddly and frustrating depending on which particular method you use to make the block.  There are many different ways of making them and I am not going into all the processes here today.  Suffice to say if you google flying geese there are hundreds of posts and tutorials online to show you how.

Well the theme of this post as you can guess is little triangular blocks of colour, flying around in a circle all pieced together.  Our weekly class decided a tutorial on foundation piecing would be interesting.  It was suggested that the block Circle of Geese could be a good place to start.  

Fabric was purchased, templates printed and very detailed instructions of the process were produced by K. who put a lot of thought and work into this tutorial.

In my wisdom (not) I decided before we started on our nice new fabrics and templates I would do a very quick summary using scraps and a template from the Paper Piecing Workbook by Elizabeth Dackman.  Using paper foundations is sometimes a challenge, you have to make sure your printer is producing the copy exactly as it should be and its always best to check the little indicator line/square is the exact size required.  So templates at the ready and lots of scraps I demonstrated a quick recap of the method.  This is the template and the finished Geese.  To date I think we have about 15 or 20 blocks which will be joined together to make a lap quilt for charity.

The circle of Geese block was duly started at class this week, everyone had their packs with instructions and background fabrics all we had to provide was 5 x 3" scraps of coloured fabric in the shades of the colour wheel.  Chatter stopped as we all concentrated on what we were to do.  Sewing machines hummed and there were a few mishaps along the way.  My first two blocks were fine 

block 1

block 2

but then I mixed up the third and got the pieces in the wrong order.  

block 3

AARGH!  time ran out on the night and of course I had to do a bit of reverse stitching! 

all unpicked

I did think about starting from scratch again with new fabric and template but thought I would try and salvage my mess.  I did manage it without too much difficulty and was able to use the fabrics and the template again.  

the offending 3rd block

and block 4

All is well in the end and I am really pleased with my finished block, 

which will join the others and migrate into a lovely cheery quilt to be donated to our chosen charity this session.  I hope you agree that this is a lovely block and well worth the effort to make.  A technical challenge successfully executed!