Cutting and Calculating Flying Geese

I’m still waiting for three final pieces of KFC contrast fabric to arrive in order to start sewing on this quilt, but I’ve cut everything that I already have. So now we wait.

These pieces are the geese wedges, the rectangles for around the block, and the cornerstones for the blocks.

Here’s all the background pieces for the geese. I need 320 individual pieces to make a quilt that is around 60×80 — 40 goose panels for 20 blocks total.

I did a lot of math to determine how many pieces I needed of each fabric and shape and how many I wanted to get out of each piece of fabric. Most of the pieces were half yards, but a few were third yards. The third yards were a little skimpy for the pieces I needed. Luckily, I’ve been able to make up the needed pieces with the larger cuts. The stuff on order is all half yards.

The piecing paper I was waiting for actually arrived yesterday so I got all my geese templates printed and ready to go last night.

I took some time today to make a test block to make sure that my calculations on the paper pieced block were correct. I wanted to actually make a block with that paper pieced goose section and the other block pieces. And I’m really happy that it worked perfectly!

This block is big! I think it’s 16 inches square. This quilt will go together quickly. (that big aqua block will be another goose section — I just didn’t want to piece another goose section for the test block.)

I also wanted to determine the sizes for the goose and background pieces so making this block was really important. I had underestimated the size needed for the background pieces.

You can see in that photo that i didn’t leave myself a full 1/4 inch seam allowance. The background pieces were actually big enough, but I didn’t allow myself any room for error. I would have needed to place them very precisely each time, which is unlikely to happen. So I increased the size of the background pieces.

Yesterday after Rico’s sheep herding lesson, I dug in and finished the border on my moss garden quilt. It’s such a chore to manipulate all that mass of fabric to put on a border. It took several hours to get it all assembled and I’m really glad it’s done. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I just LOVE that strata for the smaller inner border. There are so many amazing colors in that simple design. It’s so brilliant!

I was going to take a photo of it outdoors this evening, but we got back from our walk so late that it was too dark. It was really hot today so we started our walk later than normal.

The sky was so gorgeous tonight!