Dancing Geese - Project Quilting time to vote

At left: "Dancing Geese" 10" x 18.5" Project Quilting, Season 2, Challenge 5: Flying Geese, Mar. 2011  

Quick recap of the challenge Flying Geese: 
1. Your inspiration is Flying Geese. I'm sure you've all seen the traditional flying geese. Your challenge is to let them inspire you to do something unexpected.

2. For an extra twist this week, you are required to use a complimentary (opposites on the color wheel) color scheme.

I actually spent a lot of time coming up with the layout for this quilt. Using my computer, I played with many, many different arrangements. One of the things I love about using traditional quilt blocks is the way different parts of the block are emphasized or de-emphasized depending on color and fabric placement.

I knew I wanted the background fabric to be all the same so the triangle parts of the geese would be the focal point. Once I finally came up with a layout I wanted to do, it was time to start playing with complimentary color schemes.

I went to my stash to see what fabrics I had that I thought would work with and I wanted the fabrics for the triangles to be the same color but to range from light to dark. The color that provided me with the most range from my stash was yellow, although yellow is a light color so it doesn’t have a large range of shades. And if the geese were going to be yellow, then the background would have to be purple. I found a wonderful purply batik that had cream and yellow colored swirls, so it was time to get started.

"Dancing Geese" detail

I knew that I could fuse the triangles to the background but I was a little concerned about the background showing through the yellow fabric and I also didn’t want the geese to be so flat.

I played around with some origami-like folds, kind of like making prairie points, only I didn’t realize that until later. The triangles are pretty small, only 2” on the longest point. (The 3-D quality of the triangles is more noticeable in the “Side View” photo.)

A few false starts on figuring out how to piece the background led to cutting the background fabric for each “stripe” and drawing the shape on the wrong side, much like using a template only I traced by placing the fabric over my full-sized diagram on my lightbox.

Still using the lightbox, I placed the triangle in its proper place then sewed adjoining pieces and attaching the bottoms of the triangles at the same time. The points of the triangles were sewn into place during the quilting.

"Dancing Geese" side view

I made the top and left borders the same width as each other and made the right and bottom borders the same as each other but larger than the left and top borders and I added a light purple cord in the larger yellow borders to contain the triangle that extended beyond the background. I decided to do some of the quilting with the opposite color, which is something I don’t do a lot, but I think it helped the design. I did some echo quilting around the triangles with a yellow thread and also stitched in the ditch on the yellow inner border and more echo quilting in the purple background with purple thread.

For the binding I used the same strip- facing technique that I used on the last challenge quilt “After the Rain” because I liked how well it worked.

More about Dancing Geese

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Click on any of the photos to see them larger.

To see the other entries, go to the Flying Geese page.