In my last Quilty update I shared that I had finally started my Teal Flying Geese quilt, which seemed like a momentous point in time and now that I’ve roughly calculated I’m about half way through creating the blocks I felt that I should share a progress update.
Shortly after my ‘starting announcement’ in September I had eighteen sets of four geese, these in fact and I couldn’t resist laying them out to see a) what they looked like and b) how big they were and therefore how many more blocks I would need to make.
I reckoned then - and agree now - that these are about a quarter of the number of blocks I’ll need to make for the quilt I have in mind. But I also realised when I laid them out on the floor, that I wanted a funkier layout.
Something more like this.
But enough of the playing with fabric and layouts, I needed more blocks. So more blocks have been made using complementing and contrasting colours, but always with the plain teal background.
And now I have 29 of these blocks, which is just under half of what I need by my very rough calculations.
I told you they were rough, and from this you can probably work out that I’m a visual person so doing the quilt math was easier for me this way. And to me, it makes perfect sense - even the ‘geesed’ terminology!
I spent an afternoon ahead of my patchwork group session cutting the next batch of squares to turn into geese - I love how this has quickly become my ‘take to’ project for the longer patchwork afternoon sessions, and in each of our group’s recent updates my entry has been ‘making a million flying geese’ (which of course is a little exaggeration).
After that afternoon of cutting though I’ve realised that I need some more of the plain teal fabric. I’d bought what I had in two batches previously, so I’m not too worried about the colour not being exactly the same and I know that it’s still available, as it’s a fairly standard item for this fabric provider.
Now I need to guesstimate how much I’ll need. I’ve guesstimated that I have enough for approximately three quarters of my plan, but I also want to have some (but not too much) leftover for any borders so I’m quarrelling with myself about just how much I need before I place that order.
But now that I’ve seen how it is likely to look (or similar-ish) my mind is racing ahead to backing and borders.
For the backing I have some fabrics in mind. The darker brown above I picked up for £6 at my patchwork group from one of the members downsizing her stash - and I optimistically hoped there might be enough for the back of this quilt. I’m not sure there is, but as I don’t yet know what actual size the quilt will be that’s based on instinct and mentally judging the material to the size of our bed.
The darker brown is a vintage fabric and no longer available, which is a shame as it’s lovely and perfect for my quilt. The lighter more mustardy version is one I saw while at the new fabric shop in Newark recently, and while I knew the colour was different, I thought the pattern might be similar.
It’s not as similar as I thought though! But I like them both, and I like them both together, so I think with plenty more pondering they could work together - but it’d need to be in a creative way.
For the borders my mind is saying there should be a smaller flying geese border, and I think my mind could be right - but for the time being I’m not committing to that, or even giving it too much more thought as there’s plenty of other flying geese pondering to be done.
And more blocks to be made, which is my priority (for this quilt in any case!)
