A Gaggle of Geese

When I left off yesterday, I had about half of the rectangles and squares cut for 78 flying geese. By then, I was very tired of cutting, and I decided to quit for the day. When I came into the sewing room this morning, I still had some cutting to do to cut 78 rectangles, and 156 squares. As I was cutting, I put the rectangles in the box on the left, and the squares in the box on the right.

Then, I lidded both boxes and gave them a good shake to mix up the pieces pretty well. I wanted to sew them back together scrappy.

About an hour later, I had 78 one-winged geese.

It was only then that I took another look at the picture on the pattern and realized that the right and left sides of the flying geese were supposed to match. Oy.

For a while I considered whether this was important or not, and then decided to go ahead trying to match them as much as possible. Some of my fabrics were used up, while I still had enough of others to cut a matching side if I needed to. In some cases, I just matched value and design as closely as I could. In the end, only 10 of the 78 ended up mismatched, and of those, only 2 were mismatched enough to be noticeable. Surely the quilt police will forgive me this transgression.

After I'd ironed them open, I had my 78 flying geese. Phew!

Let me tell you, that's a whole lotta cuttin' n' sewin' right there.

Tomorrow I'll start sewing the pieced blocks together into strips. I'll have to wait for the sashing fabric, scheduled to arrive on Friday, before I can finish off the top. Things are moving along, and I'm getting excited to see this quilt top finished. This project was started on July 15, 2013. I worked on some of the embroidery while I sat with Mike who was hospitalized for ten days in October of 2013. It has a history, and soon it will be history.