Squirrel! A quilt in the June 2021 APQ magazine caught my eye--it's actually the cover quilt. It features flying geese in two versions. I decided a cropped portion of the design would make a great baby quilt. However, I did not want to cut the large number of 2.5" squares required for stitch and flip corners and corner squares on the small flying geese--8 per block. There would be a lot of extra sewing to try to save the small waste triangles as HSTs. So pencil and graph paper planning ensued.
As you can see, there were a lot of seams in the pieced smaller flying geese (does this block have another name--maybe pyramid geese?). My thought was to use HSTs for the smaller triangles and assemble it in two rows, as laid out below. I cut those from print 2.5" strips I had on hand, and cut larger corner triangles from white.
You can see a bit of the pattern in the corner of the pic. I sewed the small geese rows together first. Who has already spotted what happened next? Give yourself a pat on the back if you correctly noticed the inner geese pieces were too small.
Yeah, way too small! I used Bonnie Hunter's Essential Triangle ruler to cut the geese pieces from my precut 2.5" strips, not wanting to cut a size square I do not have in my scrap system to cut in half--or waste 5" squares--for the inner geese.
I assembled the pyramid geese and added the corner white triangles. The larger geese were also cut with Bonnie's Essential Triangle tool. This exercise took a couple of hours, but I'm glad to eliminate assembly seams while using up lots of scraps. I'll continue using prints for the pyramid geese and solids for the large geese, a bunch of which I cut yesterday. My cropped portion of the quilt design will have 16 blocks and I'll add a narrow border or two to make it about 36" square. Another new project to add to the list, but I am so happy when I can use up a lot of these scraps I save, and use as leader-enders. This is about the fourth leader-ender I have going now :)
4 comments:
Another fabulous quilt of yours in the making! Squirrel....cute name. I am looking at all those triangles and thinking....yikes. =) This will make a lovely baby quilt.
Owww, you made my brain hurt thinking about how you figured that all out. I can tell it's gonna be cute - scrappy is the best!
I didn't see it coming. I was just following along and impressed at your ability to figure it all out. Looks like a great design!
Four leader/ender projects?? I am lucky to come up with 2--one for each machine I keep set up. And I just finished up the one at my Pfaff, so I need to dig up another.
I am so bad at figuring the mechanics of things. I'd never even try to get that all worked out on graph paper! On to another project for me!
But using up scraps is always tempting...
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