Flying Geese Quilt Blocks Revisited

I’ve made a lot of quilts using the flying geese block. It’s the unit in the photo above with the magenta central triangle and smaller triangular lavender “wings”. The traditional block is always twice as long as it is wide.

I’m a big fan of flying geese rulers. I wrote a blog post about 3 flying geese rulers in 2014. Essentially none of these rulers are still available for purchase anymore! Nothing wrong with the rulers, the folks who created them have moved on.

There are lots of ways to make flying geese blocks. Cutting the triangles individually works well—that’s what the flying geese rulers made easy. There is a stitch-and-flip method using squares on each end of a rectangular block and sewing diagonally across them, then folding the square back to make the small triangle. There is a 4 at a time method that’s quick but fussy. And if you are perfectionist, paper piecing templates are the way to go.

This week I made blocks using the cut-your-own triangles and a 4 at-a-time oversized method.

The pansy’s were made from the triangles I cut. I really enjoy having a set of blocks I can chain piece without having to get up to press anything until I’m done. It made a good, if not totally perfect block.

12 inch block using the 4 at-a-time method of sewing flying geese

The watermelon block was made using the 4 at-a-time oversized method. I read that the exact cut 4-at-a-time method tends to run a bit skimpy if your sewing isn’t perfect. So I went with a slightly oversized block that needed to be trimmed to size. Sounds easy, but not so much. I thought I had accurately trimmed the flying geese but they needed some finessing to fit in the block. There is a ruler for trimming flying geese blocks but I don’t own it.

I still have two of the rulers I reviewed 11 years ago. (The third, my favorite, wasn’t in the box with all my rulers, but I expect it’s someplace)!! However, I’m going to invest in the Creative Grids® Flying Geese Tool to see how that works. It’s the ruler that is currently most available. And I love the fact that Creative Grids rulers have a no slip back. It makes them easy to work with. I’ll let you know how this Square-in-a-Square block turns out once I get the new ruler.

Blue and Yellow Quilt with Circles

Here’s another blue and yellow quilt I just completed which will probably go to a refugee from Ukraine at some point in the fall. Like the Hachi Quilt made using Ukrainian blue and yellow fabric which I made this spring, this quilt includes sunflower flowers and storks. The sunflowers are reverse circles peeking through to the top of the quilt and the storks are in the center of both the big Economy Quilt Blocks.

I took the template from one of favorite quilts, “Flying Economy” quilt and adapted it to add reverse circles, circles made using quarter circles blocks and semi-circles. The “Flying Economy” quilt I made in 2018 was inspired by a quilt designed by Sam Hunter called “Fourteen on Point”.

Most of the quilting in this quilt is straight line quilting done with a walking foot. But I know that I’m not any good doing free motion echo quilting around circles, so I hand quilted the circles using perle cotton #12 and a bit of #8 since I only had the bright yellow in the thicker thread.

This rectangular quilt is a nice size to wrap up in, hang on the back of a sofa, or to fold and place at the foot of a bed.