Discover a Modified Flying Geese Pattern for your Quilt Border

In a different article, we discussed using a traditional Flying Geese pattern for a border. Click here to read that article.

In this article, let's look at one way we can modify Flying Geese for something different and interesting - I call them Broken Geese.

The quilt below features 9 batik squares each having a different cat pose. The finished size of each cat is 3 3/4" - not all that large.

I wanted to make a wall hanging that was at least 40 inches square to fit a particular wall, so I knew I needed to add several borders.

The first border was easy to figure out, since I decided there should be some separation between the blocks and a pieced border.

The next dilemma was what to do for the pieced border. The fabric was all hand dyed, and all I had were some relatively narrow strips of each color fabric.

Half-square triangles seemed like a good use of the fabric, so I began sewing them together, thinking that I might just have a couple of rows of half-square triangles - half dark blue and half another color.

When I thought I had enough half-square triangles, I began to lay them out around the quilt. Certainly one option would have been to sew two half-square triangles together to make regular Flying Geese. But I decided I wanted to do something a little different.

In a simple modification, I added a strip of dark blue fabric between the rows of half-square triangles. The process for the actual sewing was fairly simple.

I knew that I wanted both halves of the geese to be the same, so I decided that the easiest way to accomplish that was to create a repeating pattern of colors.

In the photograph on the right, you can see that the pattern includes yellow, purple, brown and green (in addition to the blue).

The same problem of turning the corner presented itself as with regular Flying Geese. In this quilt, it was somewhat more complicated because there was more than one border.

Before I added the broken geese to the sides of the quilt, I decided to add the lavender to purple gradation. This, too, was hand dyed fabric, and was a little more interesting than plain fabric.

Then I figured out how wide the whole border needed to be in order to have a nice size square in the corner that I could fill with small blocks.

Each corner has two fish a mouse and a pinwheel - all things that cats love.

Once that was together the solid black border was added to create a final frame to the wall hanging.

The overall size of this wall hanging is 40 1/2" square.

You may also want to take a look at the article about using regular Flying Geese in your border.

Happy Quilting!

Penny is a quilter of more than 24 years who seeks to interest new quilters and provide them with the resources necessary to create beautiful quilts.

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©2006, Penny Halgren

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