geese are calling

the calendar says it's officially fall in the northern hemisphere, the september equinox has been breached. sure, we're still in 100f+ temperatures in this desert we call home, but we'll take the name and spirit of the season even if it's still like summer on the weather report.

fall means geese and i've been hearing mine call as i work my way around wensleydale in the sewing room. i opened up the project box for "grellow garden geese" once again to see what's in there and what's going on with my geese. i found a few cut but unassembled, so i've worked those up between diamonds and rectangles in wensleydale fall colors.  

this morning i was looking over the blocks and feeling like this whole thing -an attempt to use stash and unloved fabrics rashly, unreasonable purchased - was the typical hot mess. some geese i really like; others are just plain flat and boring. what was i thinking pairing those fabrics?

in light of my enui, i was considering packing everything back up and hiding it away again. then d5 walked into the room and saw the blocks strewn around the floor and exclaimed, "oh, i love these colors!" huh. maybe it's not a completely unlovable project after all? as long as someone loves it, it's worth proceeding with. 

something needs to happen either way because my sewing space is more than normally crowded with the piles of fabrics pulled for wensleydale teetering all over the place and now the geese spread all over as well. decisions need to be made because this isn't a workable space as is.

i moved all the sets of blocks onto the piano room floor to layout in a possible setting for the quilt top, to see how they're looking together and how many i have/might yet need.

i have enough for a 56'' x 64'' quilt, minus four blocks. there are two sets of blocks, 12 each, that are slightly smaller than all the other blocks. what i did a few years ago to cause this discrepancy is a mystery. i decided to line up all the smaller blocks in the same row. it won't matter that it's less wide than the other rows. i'll add a small fabric strip to make up any difference in length. that will give the top a fun "make do" sort of vibe that i think will add some charm. i could have trimmed aaaallll the other blocks down to match the smaller ones, but why would i do that to myself?

i really don't know how i feel about all this now that it's laid out. that doesn't make me like it any better. but my girls are saying they like it even though "there's so much yellow!" yes there is. it just is what it is now and it needs to be done. i don't want to make it bigger by adding more colors/fabrics to change the look. so i think we're gonna go with what we've got and be done.
 

sunny geese, a finish

this quilt is one pile of sunshine and happy!

i've taken photos of it a few times and neglected to post it as a finish. so now you're going to get a couple different views of my very cheerful "sunny geese" quilt.

it's composed of yellow and low-volume hsts set in a flying geese arrangement.

i'd say at least half the yellows are blender prints selected for their color rather than florals or geometrics that i like as stand alone prints. it was hard to find yellows in the sunny range i wanted - not too soft and buttery, not to gold or brassy - that weren't blender prints. there was one heather ross "sleeping beauty" print that was the absolute perfect color. i had a few other lovely florals, including some liberty tana lawn, which played very nicely with everything else.

the low-volumes are mostly black and white prints, but there are some that have yellow, grey, or light tan in them, too. i also used a yellow liberty "betsy" in a few places. it's not as light as most of the background prints, but it was too light to use as a yellow. having a range of volume even in the low-volume gives more depth to the quilt.

the prints are all small to medium in scale, which works nicely with this size block and arrangement. i'm not opposed to cutting up large scale prints for such a project, but i do like that you can tell what each one is in this quilt.

the binding is a classic black and white stripe, which sets off the sunny yellows so nicely.

i happened to get a bit of machine oil on the quilt and needed to soak that corner, which i did in  my bawthroom sink. oddly, it looked so pretty and at home there that i had to take a picture! it's probably my most liked photo on ig this year. the lighting in there is so nice that it's a great place to take quilt photos, albeit a strange place for a quilt, even if i did do all my quilting in my bawthroom once apon a time. 

"sunny geese" measures 56"x64" and is composed of 4"hsts (or 4"x8" flying geese).

that's 224 4" hsts total in the quilt. when i make them, i always overcut my squares and trim down with the bloc-loc 6.5" hst ruler. my formula for knowing what size squares to start with is start with a square 1" larger than the finished hst will be. so, here, for 4" hsts i started with 5" cut squares, made the hsts, and trimmed down to 4.5" hsts, which finish at 4" square once sewn together.

i thought an outdoor photo in my citrus mini orchard, which was blooming at the time, would be a nice setting for this quilt. but it didn't do much for me. i think the indoor photos, even the bawthroom photo, show it off much better.

i like to take flatlay photos of my quilts on my bedroom floor, me standing on the bed over them. it works pretty well. but i'm also supposed to crop the photo and get the bed out of there - haha. looks like i forgot this time.

the backing is composed of yardage from an older two-toned white and yellow "october afternoon" floral print i've had for ages on one side, and pieces of a favorite ditsy low-volume print and some heather ross yellows on the other half.

i used a cut of the sleeping beauty print because it's so pretty (and ordered more for other projects) and i wanted to highlight it a bit by putting a chunk of it on the back where it would be noticed as a large piece. the honey bears and paper hats were prints that came in a fat quarter pack i ordered and i didn't think i would be able to use again, so i used up the rest in the backing. since they worked well in this quilt, i thought i should use them in a place i knew i liked them. however, i have decided i like the honey bears and could use them again, so i got a bit more of that, too. they seemed like such odd prints at first and i wouldn't have ordered them on their own if they hadn't come in the bundle. the paper hats are a deep goldy yellow and although they fit in this quilt, i think i'm done with them.

 

this was an easy, classic kind of patchwork to make and a very satisfying finish. all that cheerful yellow just makes people smile. the quilt now resides in our family room and gets lots of snuggles every day.

on mother's day, i happened to be wearing a yellow dress and couldn't resist taking "sunny geese" with me to church instead of my usual lap quilt. these geese are well behaved and welcome wherever they go.

instagram: #sunnygeesequilt

my flocks

 

It’s Fall, have you been hearing the geese call? They actually began calling me this summer when I saw a few compelling sunny yellow quilts and decided to make a scrappy yellow quilt of my own with HSTs in a flying geese formation.

My yellows felt very fresh and cheerful, unlike the sunny Summer weather, which was just plain horribly hot. I stuck to buttery, lemony, and very slightly gold tones for my fabric picks. It gave me exactly the impression I was going for. 

I included some really special pieces in just small amounts, mixed in with many blender prints. I finally broke into my Heather Ross stash, which I hardly ever touch! I love her prints and buy them frequently, but I rarely use them  most are novelty prints and I have a hard time mixing them in with my usual picks. However, in this scrappy quilt, they blended perfectly, even the funky ones like the honey bears and those newspaper hats. I’m beginning to get a feel for how to use them, so I think they will be showing up in my work more.

I even splurged on the backing by using a large piece of the Sleeping Beauty print. Unfortunately, I didn’t include the selvage like I meant to. No big loss, but it’s a touch I like to add when I can. I also used up the hats and bears on the back because I wanted to use them in a place I knew they worked and I would like them. I think they make a whimsical surprise on the back that will be fun to discover when using the quilt.

This quilt is all quilted up now. I used the HST squares as a grid for doing an orange peel FMQ pattern. I like how it adds curves to contrast with the angles. I've even got a binding made for this project, but as I have 5 other quilts that need binding completed, I'm thinking these geese won't be in use til after Winter, and that's just fine. The sun will come back out in Spring when it should.

But the geese aren't all hibernating just yet. Early last year I was pondering and lamenting over a lot of my early-on fabric purchases made in the excitement of discovering quilting, and trying to decide what to do with a pile of half-yards I had rashly acquired.  I decided to mix in coordinates from stash, some solids, and make a bunch of geese. These are true flying geese blocks, 4"x8" geese, made with the bloc-loc ruler. I'm using the squares-and-rectangle-trim-and-flip method, so I'm also get loads of HSTs as I go.

I'm getting so many geese out of the yardage I have that I decided to break it into two quilts: one warm, one cool-toned. I made a few early on this year, and the project fell to the wayside. But then my longtime quilty friends Rachel Hauser of Stitched in Color and Lucy Brennan of Charm About You organized a Fall Flying Geese sewalong called "Geesey Geesey" (which my brain misread as "Geesey Geese" for several weeks, haha.)

Rachel has a pattern for her no-waste method and all the info for constructing a flying geese quilt in three different styles. She's a master teacher, so if you'd like to give geese a try, go learn from Rachel. I already had the project underway and was using the ruler, so I'm using the quilt along mainly for motivation to complete these projects. 

I'm calling the cool-toned quilt Olmstead's Geese as I was listening to Genius of Place, a biography of Frederick Law Olmstead when I began the quilt. The greens and blues remind me of his parks and landscape design career. (Such an interesting book, by the way, if you like historical figure biographies. I'm a huge Biltmore and Central Park fan, so it was right up my listening alley.)

the warm-toned quilt has been dubbed Grellow Garden Geese because of the heavy use of "grellow" (greeny-yellows and yellowy-greens) colors in the quilt. I'm using this floral as the inspiration print to guide the additional fabric selections. There are many golden "grellows" in the palette, as well as very light yellows and some spice browns. It's definitely a departure from my usual palette choices: very Fall feeling and with an almost ugly vintage 70's vibe. I imagine you could dig it up out of a chest in someone's attic.

These were some combinations I began with.

I'm currently in the process of adding in the browns from the inspo floral print. I can't say I love any of these on their own, but I'm hoping it all plays nicely when it's done.

So there you have my flocks, flying geese quilts for at least two seasons.