What am I doing wrong?

I am once again participating in the mystery quilt from Meadow Mist Designs, this time based on those wonderful cookies called Macarons!!!

For the months of October and November, we made flying geese….and more flying geese…..and even more flying geese!! She has promised us that this is the last of them.

But, it did give me an opportunity to perfect my flying geese technique. But, alas, that was not the case and I am still having troubles.

We are making them by the 4-at-a-time method and I love how they look when they are in process…..

But when I start trimming them down, the point side always seems to be a bit short!! I even marked the first set so I would remember when I used these units in another step……

I figured that I had not been careful enough in my piecing or ironing so set out the next month to do better.

In November, I VERY carefully pieced and ironed, but they still ended up a bit short on one side (normally the left one)…..

‘I am using the Wing-Clipper tool to trim.

Do you have any thoughts about what I am doing wrong???

ALL help will be appreciated!!

The Flying Geese are airborne…

Over the last two days, I have been walking thru the process of designing a quilt using leftover scraps. Here is the third….and final….. installment!!

As I continued thinking about the outside border, I remembered some other, smaller blocks that were in the stash…..

At some point, I had sewn them together to make Half-Square Triangle blocks.

And, if I put TWO of them together, I get another flying geese…..

….Sort of…..

So now I could use these pieced Flying Geese to finish the side border…..

….keeping the triangles with green outlines for the top and bottom.

The geese on the outside are a bit abstract and only a few of them actually show up as geese, but I think that it is working okay…..

So, let’s add one more border to tie it all together…..

I am pleased with the result and really had fun playing with the Flying Geese designs.

Oh no…..

There are still some leftovers!!!

I guess that they will become seeds for the next time Alice and I have a tea party “Down the Rabbit Hole”.

Now if I can just remember what I was working on before I found these scraps???

Does anyone remember????

Down the rabbit hole

I don’t do this very often, but recently I ended up “down Alice’s rabbit hole”….so to speak.

It all started out so innocently…..

I was getting ready to start working on the Saddle-Bill Stork collage quilt and remembered a package of scraps from a workshop that I had taken several years ago. This was important because they were black and white scraps and had “Misty Fuse” already applied to them. They would be PERFECT for my Stork collage.

As I looked, I pulled out a large box labeled “Miscellaneous Fabrics and Blocks”, being fairly certain that the scraps were there. Well, the bag was NOT in this box, but there was a bag of black and white fabrics, with a few reds thrown in for good measure…..

….. leftovers from a charity raffle quilt that had been made many years ago…..

Eventhough these fabrics didn’t have Misty Fuse on them, I pulled them out and started admiring them….

Now, what could I make with these lovely fabrics????

And before I knew it, I was DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE!!!

I decided that I wanted to turn the strip-pieced triangles into Flying Geese blocks and turned to the Accuquilt machine and the FG die that came with the machine…..

In a few short minutes, I was off and making flying geese blocks!!

Before long I had for strips of FG with spacers between them…..

But where are these geese flying to???

Come back tomorrow for more!!

Crumbs complete!!

Yesterday I wrote about the start of the crumb block quilt design phase. Today I have to actually put my thoughts together into a cohesive design!!!

The first decision was to have the geese move in a left to right direction so that you can follow them across the quilt. This also meant that the crumb block would float to different corners of the block…..

The black block was going to be in the center, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to add flying geese to it so tried just putting borders around it…..

I liked that better, but it looked a bit bland, so I added a small strip of a multi-color fabric that I found on the shelf…..

…and really like the way it separated the black block from the others.

In the final piecing, I made the strip a bit wider and probably should have centered it better in the borders, but I am still happy with how it looks….

Let me say once again how pleased I am with having all of my fabric out so that I can see it at one time. I would NEVER have remembered this multi-color fabric as it would have been in a completely different box!!!

My plan was to go up the next day and pick some borders but, the more that I looked at the quilt, I didn’t want to add anything else to it. So this top is FINISHED!!!

I really like this layout design and can see where it would work with almost any 8 inch block. I am looking forward to doing some more playing with it!!