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.

 

 

 

Working with magenta and friends

I had a stretch of four full days of quilting with friends in the Chicago area, and was able to work from start to finish on a half-square triangle quilt top like this one by Katie of "Sew Katie Did." Since not all my fabric dyed up well enough to use, and because I wasn't sure how the quilt would look in such a different color palette, I just made a small baby quilt (38x44). I'm pleased with how it turned out. I love the quiet palette Katie used for her quilt, but I think the format works well with these highly contrasting bright colors with black as well. I was also pleasantly surprised that the improvised placement of the triangles went very quickly. I made squares of each color with each color, and then I just started putting them up on the design wall. After placing all the squares, I spent perhaps another 10 minutes or so making small adjustments, and that was it. It helped that a couple of the other quilters took a look also, and confirmed that the arrangement was fine. I think if I'd been by myself at home, I might have kept fine-tuning longer.

Back from the retreat, I'm finishing up some projects. First to be done is this quilt, made a year ago with my friend Kay, when she was visiting me from Boston. We made the blocks together, and then I did the quilting some months ago. But what color binding to use? I saw Kay last weekend, and she decided on red. I think it looks great!