One of the great block techniques I picked up from the FREE Craftsy Block of the Month 2013 class was for flying geese. The method that Laura shares is very clever in that you end up with 4 flying geese units at once! It's very quick, easy, and accurate. If you need to produce many flying geese units, this is the way to do it! Once you sign up for the free class you can find the instructions for the technique in Lesson 12: October - Topic 3.
I quite enjoyed making the geese this way. I usually use the 'rectangle with 2 squares on each corner, stitch, flip, and clip' method which takes longer and wastes a bit of fabric.
Funny enough, as I was organizing my fabric cupboard I found this 'Lazy Girl' No Math ruler for Flying Geese x 4. It was one of the first things I bought when I started quilting (in fact, I looked it up! I bought it the first week of September, 2011 and I believe I started quilting in August of that year!). I paid $24.98 for it at a nearby quilt shop and I didn't even know what flying geese were!! The package is still not even open!
I pulled it out to look at it and sure enough, it makes flying geese the same way Laura does! You can use the squares to make perfect flying geese 4 at a time as well as half square triangles and quarter square triangles.
There are twelve markings to make that many sizes. The ruler is used to cut the squares of fabric and then they are sewn together to make the units. There is no math, no waste, no triangles to cut, and no bias edges. Wow! How come I never opened this package up and used this cool tool??? Oh yeah, because I didn't know what flying geese were back then...and then I filed the ruler away and forgot about it. But now...I DO know what they are, the lines on the ruler make perfect sense, I won't have to figure out the sizes of squares, and I'm so excited for the next time I have to make flying geese or hst units!!! I guess it was worth the $24.98 after all!
That is hilarious about the ruler! :)
Posted by: Maureen | November 30, 2013 at 08:25 PM