Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Jennie's Flying Geese Tutorial

Jennie's fabulous block "breaking Out" was the winner of the Fat Quarterly Reader Designer Challenge from Issue 1 - Fresh Start.

Jennie originally designed her block for the Pillow Talk Swap but now she has very kindly written up a tutorial for you to make one of your own! If you make this block we would love it if you upload photos of your block to our Flickr group as we would love to see!

Tutorial for “Breaking Out” - a flying geese block
designed by Jennie Finch Schauer

Materials (for one block):
12- 2.5” x 4.5” print rectangles
24- 2.5” background squares
4- 2.5 x 6.5” background rectangles

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Draw a line diagonally across each of the 24- 2.5” background squares:

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Place the square on top of a print rectangle, making sure the line is as shown in the photo below:

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Sew on the line, then trim ¼” away from the line towards the outside of the block. Press towards the background (the grey, in this example):

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Take a second 2.5” background square and position it as shown in the photo below:

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Sew on the line, then trim ¼” away from the line towards the outside of the block (see photo):

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Press towards the background (the grey, in this example):

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Repeat these steps to make 12 flying geese blocks. : Sew the flying geese into 4 groups of 3 geese each. Then lay them out!

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You can spin them to the right…

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Or to the left…

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Once you decide which way you’d like the geese to spin, place the 2.5” x 6.5” rectangles on the outside edge of the flying geese units:

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Sew the 2.5” x 6.5” rectangles to the outside edge of each of the flying geese units, pressing towards the background rectangle. Sew the quarters into your finished block!

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7 comments:

  1. Great tutorial - thanks for sharing it.

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  2. I think this would be a perfect project to do with the solid multi color jelly rolls we just go in! We have Citrus marbles or the 1930s sort of saturated pastels and white or black solid jelly rolls too. They are already precut into 2.5" strips! THis might just inspire me to try flying geese (I've always been a little afraid of them). Thanks for sharing this!!!

    Anna

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  3. That's great, but why not post a tutorial for a NO waste geese block??

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  4. what a great tutorial! i struggle with flying geese, so i need to try this method. thanks for sharing your technique!

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  5. What is the finished size of this block?

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  6. I have tried all kinds of ways of doing flying geese and prefer to make them oversize and cut them down with a flying geese ruler (there are a few of them out there). I also like methods that produce more than one at a time, ie. the no waste method and the Eleanor Burns method as well.

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