Feeling Goosey

My friend Jenny and I were talking quilts the other day, and she was trying to decide on what to do for a wedding quilt she wants to make. "I'm thinking about flying geese," she said, "Have you ever done one?"  

Hah.  As a matter of fact, most of the quilts I've made in the last year or two have involved flying geese.  And Jenny's comments made me get them out and get photos of them -- which was no small feat as they are big quilts and I don't have a great way to photograph such large quilts.  But with some ribbon and pins and command hooks, I rigged something and here you go.  Please take my word for it that these all have straight edges and square corners -- really, they do! 

So here's my "Christmas Geese," one I finished in December after having the geese units floating around my sewing room for a year or two.  Most of the fabrics were from a bundle of geometric prints I fell in love with somewhere along the way -- if you recognize the collection of fabric, do let me know in the comments because I sure don't remember!  It's a fun Christmas quilt.  It's quilted with an overall swirly design.

 

And then there's the Polka dotted Geese quilt I made a year or so ago, which I mentioned here.  At a quilt show a few years ago, I'd bought a luscious bundle of polka dotted fabric, which I'd had out on a shelf in my sewing room because they looks so happy together.  And during my one and only trip to Festival of Quilts in the UK a few years ago, I bought a bundle of assorted Oakshott cottons which I also had out because the colors were so beautiful.  I was rummaging through my shelves, looking for a particular book, when I happened to put the Oakshott bundle next to the polka dot fabric bundle.  And suddenly they needed to be geese.  I loved making this quilt!  (And truly, the edges are straight!)

The quilt that marked the start of my obsession with fly geese is this huge red and white geese quilt.  I have a TON of red fabric in my stash, a lot of which I collected when I was working on red and white house blocks for another massive quilt.  I started making geese with red scraps and solid white fabric, and I just kept going.  And going.  And this resulted.  I love it, and it lives on the back of the red couch in the family room where it looks happy and is great for movie-time snuggling.

This is a bit fuzzy, but you can get a sense of all of the different prints.  I arranged the geese into blocks of pairs, and was pleased when a secondary star pattern emerged.

I just put a flying geese border on my current project -- and I'm not tired of making them yet!