Half-Square Triangles and Flying Geese

Although I haven't posted since August of last year, I've been thinking about posting. I've even started a half-dozen posts, all still waiting to be finished or discarded. And wondered why I wasn't finishing any of them. I think it's because I've been holding back on writing publicly about a difficult piece. Nothing to do but to go ahead and write it. But to warm up, I'll write about a couple of simpler pieces I've finished in the last few months.

Simpler in the sense that there's no complex emotion behind these quilts, just a love of shape and color, and enjoyment of the design challenge of coming up with a pleasing whole.

The quilt below began about a year and a half ago when I happened to have out on the table some blue/turquoise/teal batiks from my stash. These are all leftovers from making Shelter. The fabrics looked lovely gathered together. I cut some up into half-square triangles, liked how they looked, and cut up the rest of the fabric into squares, ready to make HSTs. This fall I sewed the blocks, working up a design for a quilt for a friend.  I was thinking of having the squares all contiguous to each other, as I had done for other HST quilts, like this one, or the second and third photos in this post. But my friend suggested adding in some black. What a good idea! It really makes the turquoise glow.

After finishing this quilt, I started on a quilt using another simple, standard quilting block--flying geese. I've not used this block much, because its design (in its classic form) relies on precise piecing, necessary to get precise point. Precision piecing is not a strong point of mine, so I generally avoid it. I did make one flying geese quilt with improvisation rather than precision, which came out very well. But I was recently introduced to a specialty ruler that makes it really simple to up-size the block and then trim them accurately to size. I don't usually buy specialty rulers--just more money spent on something you can usually do with the normal quilters' rulers. But this ruler is definitely worth it! The quilt design comes straight from a pattern called "Remixed Geese," offered free by the Robert Kaufman company. I followed the pattern quite closely, changing the orientation of geese only in a few places.

I had a bin of fabrics that were "white with one other color" that I had collected for another quilt, and the leftovers

were perfect for this quilt. I paired these fabrics with solids, both commercial and hand-dyed.

I made extra blocks, to give me flexibility in placement; this gave me enough leftover blocks to make a baby quilt as well. This gave a home for a few problem blocks that didn't make the cut into the larger quilt, blocks that didn't have enough contrast between the "goose" (big triangle) and the "sky" (2 small triangles): the yellow print and solid blocks at left and bottom, and the blocks that use orange fabric with large white polka dots in upper right and lower left.