Flying Geese + Rail Fence Quilt

A good friend of mine gave me a stack of fat quarters recently. The fabrics were mostly beige and brown with some red and green accents. There was a single “surprise” fat quarter with cowboys herding cattle on the prairie in the stack! That presented a great challenge.

I decided it would make a fun comfort quilt for a child in a daycare. So I dove into my stash and found the three red and green checkered fabrics and the green polka dots to augment the set.

I designed this pattern. I wanted to accent the cowboys and maximize the use of the fabrics in the fat quarters. I mixed 12 inch (finished) flying geese blocks with 12 inch rail fence blocks.

The cowboys were fussy cut at 6 1/2 inches, the flying geese blocks are 6 1/2 inches, and the corner blocks were cut at 3 1/2 inches. These are are the unfinished measurements.

The strips for the rails were all cut a 3 1/2 inches x 12 1/2 inches, unfinished.

The center block in the quilt is a 4 patch (cut at 3 1/2 inches) and the flying geese are set to form a star. I used the four patch block because that’s all the cowboy fabric I had left after I fussy cut the 4 large patches! For the 4 large cowboy blocks, I turned the flying geese to form a “window” (forming a square in a square) to highlight the feature fabric. It was fun setting the flying geese blocks two different ways in this quilt.

The quilt went together really quickly. When I finished it, it just seemed a bit long for it’s width. So I trimmed off about 2 1/2 inches from the two narrow ends of the quilt. The only fabric I needed to purchase was the backing, which I also used as the binding.

I really like this design and would happily use it to make other quilts.