Stay At Home Round Robin

This week’s stay at home round robin was hosted by Anja Quilts. She chose a flying geese row. I like to make flying geese so this was fun.

I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to design a curvy flying geese. I wanted a narrow row, so this didn’t work. The curvy geese needed the space of a wider row.

There are several ways of making flying geese. One is to make a rectangle and sew small squares on the diagonal on each end. No specialty rulers are needed.

I have two flying geese rulers. When I want a single flying geese, I use Kimberly Einmos flying geese ruler. I used her ruler to make the Temperature quilt. For that quilt, I made one flying geese a day for 365 days. That was a fun quilt to make. One flying geese a day didn’t take long to make.

My other ruler is the Lazy Girl x 4 flying geese ruler.

You can make four flying geese at a time with this ruler. All the math is done for you. To make four flying geese, you cut one large square from the solid lines and four small squares from the dotted lines. The ruler makes several sizes of flying geese. I chose to make size B which finishes at 1″ x 2″.

I wondered what would happen if I fussy cut a large square from the Ginny Beyer border fabric. This was a “what if” that came out better than I expected. I’ll use this technique in another quilt someday.

You Tube has several tutorials on this method of making flying geese. The tutorials tell you to cut large and trim down. With the Lazy Girl, there is no trimming. With accurate cutting and sewing, the flying geese are the correct size. You do have to remember to divide the number of flying geese by four to get the amount of geese that you want. If you want twenty geese, you sew five. This is a fast and accurate method.

Draw a diagonal line on the small squares. Place two on the larger square as show in the picture and sew 1/4″ on each side.

Cut between the two sewn lines and press.

Add another small square with a diagonal line. Sew 1/4″ on each side of the line. I used two different fabrics because I wanted each side to be a different color.

When using two different fabrics, you will have a mirror image. This was perfect because I wanted the geese to fly up on opposite sides of the quilt.

The black and white geese were flying in no time. Both skies were the same color. I chose to have them fly around the corners of the quilt.

It’s different planning a quilt with just values, not tints and tones of colors.

It is fun to make two quilts using the same criteria.

I look forward to each Monday to have another prompt. It’s fun to see what the other quilters have done with the same prompts. Everyone has a different idea.

Deb Tucker also has a flying geese ruler, the Wing Clipper. The flying geese is made in the same manner as the Lazy Girl, but the block is made large and trimmed down.

Have a great day and happy quilting.