High Flying Geese!

When last I left you, I had just returned from the lake to my next BOM quilt in the mailbox!

Block of the Month quilts are just like sugary treats: once on the lips, forever on the hips. It only takes a second to hit that subscribe button, and you are on the hook for twelve months! This is Corey Yoder's Holliberry fabric Christmas quilt-- it passed before my eyes a few times before I succumbed. But I've always wanted a Christmas quilt on my bed, so no buyer's remorse... yet, anyway.

It was supposed to start in July, but shipping got delayed a bit so I didn't get my first month until September. I'm very good at starting projects, and so I dived right in!

Like many designer quilts lately, it's built on half-square triangles and flying geese, using that method where you draw a pencil line across on the diagonal. My lines just never seem to work-- especially on the geese-- and one of my Frivols quilts I have been working on recently was really disappointing in the way it came together-- and that is after I did a really good job on those pencil lines.

I tend to wake up at night and start worrying over things-- it helps me get back to sleep if I think about my beautiful sewing projects. One night I was lying awake at 3am thinking over the world situation, but instead, turned my thoughts to quilts and in that happy place between awake and asleep, I thought up a great way of making half square triangles. I now chide myself-- if I had kept on worrying, I might have come up with the answer to world peace. Oh, well-- this is all I got, people, but I do think it is pretty clever! It's a fairly unusual occurence when I think of a way to make something easier instead of more painstaking and time consuming.

I was excited to try it the next day. So I cut my squares, and instead of the pencil line, I just pressed my pieces across the diagonal-- wrong sides together. It is much easier that way to get the line where it needs to be-- you can match the top and bottom corners up perfectly. 

Lay the folded patch right on the corner of the base unit-- the is the beauty of this method now-- you can see exactly how it is going to fold. If you are trying to get stripes to go a certain way, always requiring impossible mental gymnastics...no surprises!

Now just open it back up, without moving it, and pin out of the seam line. The pins are really needed to flatten the patch back out at this point.

Instead of stitching on a pencil line, I'm stitching on a crease. Yes, it's correct to just stitch a hair to the left of the line to allow for the turn of the cloth, but staying ON the line is hard enough for me these days, so that's what I did.

Then just cut the seam allowance off-- it's already pressed!

I did the same thing on the other side, and voila!

So this is the great Triumvirate of the Flying Goose-- first, you have 1/4" from the point to the edge. Second and third, the diagonal seams are coming right into the corner at a 45 degree angle. Not to mention, that it's exactly 1-3/4" by 5" like it was supposed to be in the directions-- no expensive ruler or trimming step required.

Block #1 came out SUPERB...

all my points on the edges are on that 1/4" sweet spot!

...and that's a good thing, because I barely finished it when I got noticed that Block 2 is on the way-- I guess now that the shop has the fabric, they are trying to get us back on schedule? I'm not sure I appreciate that... one month in and I'm already behind!

...and to further complain-- there was enough fabric in Month One to just about make another block-- here are just some of my extra pieces. So I thought I'd make myself a "bonus" block each month-- hee, hee-- why be behind on one UFO when you can be behind on two?

Stay tuned!

xox

Carol