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How to Quilt>Flying Geese for Quilt Borders
Make your Borders Soar with Flying Geese
In our quest to create more interesting borders, we glide to Flying Geese. Originally this patchwork pattern was designed for parallel stripes running lengthwise on a bed quilt.
Way back when, the colors in the patches varied, with the smaller triangle pieces (background) being white. Since the larger triangles represented birds, often they were different colors that contrasted with the background. Often the stripes of Flying Geese had solid strips of fabric in between, and all of the geese were flying in the same direction. In "The Standard Book of Quilt Making and Collecting," Marguetire Ickis suggests that a Flying Geese quilt needed no borders. It is interesting, then, that we are suggesting that Flying Geese would be used just for a border! But, that we are. In the above quilt, Flying Geese surround a quilt that is made from folded fabric pieces that create groups of flowers. The Geese are separated from the flower garden by a 1" dark blue border strip.
The geese are various colors, yet they are in keeping with the colors of the quilt. There is no particular color pattern to the layout of the Flying Geese in the border. One way to lay out the Geese would be to have a repeat sequence - yellow, pink, lavender, purple; yellow, pink, lavender, purple, etc. all the way around. Notice the Colors of the Geese For those of you interested in colors and how they lay out on your quilt, you may want to notice how the purple, yellow and fuschia "birds" stand out as you look at the whole quilt. This happens because of the contrast of those colors to the medium blue Geese background. If I had used a dark blue, the purple would have disappeared while the light yellow and lavender would have popped out. The medium blue causes the medium colors to blend into the background, while the very light and very dark colors stand out. And What About the Corners? Instead of spending a bunch of time figuring out how to match the corners, I decided to put a cornerstone in each corner. And there's always the dilemma of which side of Geese should run to the edge of the quilt. Cornerstones helped avoid that problem as well. 2" Geese, 3" Geese or More? How to Decide
Another challenge is determining how large to make your Geese. The first consideration is the size of your quilt, and whether you want your Geese to be an identifiable part of the quilt, or you want them to kind of disappear. In this quilt, I wanted the Geese to be a noticeable part of the quilt. From there, I measured the sides of the quilt and chose a size for the Geese where the math was fairly easy. If I had wanted them to be an "incidental," I would have made them much smaller. Because this quilt used large pieces of fabric as a background for the flowers, it was relatively easy to create a size that would be convenient for adding the Flying Geese. If the finished size had been 28" by 31," determining how many Geese to place on each side would have presented a challenge. One way around that challenge would be to add border strips wide enough to bring it up to the right size. Using the above measurement as an example, by adding a 2" border to each side, the quilt would become 30" by 32" - a nice size to add 2" Flying Geese blocks. The outside blue border was added to define the path of the birds. And I chose to have them flying around the quilt in a square. It is not unusual to see them flying the same direction on opposite sides of a quilt - the top and bottom would be all pointing to the right, and the sides would be pointing up. For some reason, the geese follow each other in all of my quilts with Flying Geese in the borders. Discover more creative ideas for borders: Use Flying Geese for Borders Happy Quilting!
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This article courtesy of http://www.How-to-Quilt.com. ©2006, Penny Halgren
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