#Big Geese Quilts – #Sails

I saw a great quilt that I wanted to adapt to a queen size to make for a niece of mine. It was by Rebecca Bryan of bryanhousequilts.com. She has a great web site, great sense of design and use of color, and has a great book on those same themes as well! I initially happened upon her finished quilt, and I promptly worked out the math to make it bigger. After cutting it out and checking out her site further I found she had a tutorial in an earlier post, including measurements to enlarge it! I also start recipes without reading to the end, so this is a common theme for me! This is the link to the tutorial on this quilt: bryanhousequilts.com.

I decided to use print fabrics instead of just shades of solid blue, and enlarged it to a queen size.  I gathered my fabrics, so that I could start to plan the combinations.

I’m quite pleased with how the fabrics went together. I think the white made a nice contrast, and gave the quilt a light and almost nautical look. That’s where its name, Sails, came from.

I pieced the quilt, and set it out to pin, and began to decide how the quilting was going to be done. When piecing, I have started pinning to the side of the pressor foot, so I do not have to slow down to remove pins, or risk broken needles when running over them. This made things go a bit faster. Then I used painters tape to try different patterns for quilting after getting the quilt sandwich ready.

The straight line quilting is faintly visible above. I decided to do nesting triangles within triangles with three to nine lines of stitching, doing close lines. That took longer than I thought! The walking foot helped it go smoothly, though. Here I have used painter’s tape to mark the quilt for straight line quilting. It works spectacularly well, to keep my lines straight. After doing the first line, I removed the tape and used the first line of stitching as a guide following the width of the walking foot. When I do wider spacing, I will just use the painters tape appropriately spaced.

After quilting the straight line triangles with the walking foot, I began adding pebbles between the straight lines around the inside of the largest triangle using the open toe darning foot and FMQ technique. I thought that the pebbles would give the quilt a bit more “organic” look, since the triangles and the straight line quilting felt very mathematical.

This quilt has taken me longer to decide how to quilt, often I will do an overall pattern, or a varied pattern just with straight lines, so adding in multiple different textures in different areas has required me to set it aside and think on it before proceeding to the next area.





Cat scan of the quilt.

I bound the top of the quilt in white and the bottom 3/4 on navy blue to match the blue triangles on the sides and bottom. It turned out very well. You can see this on the image below. A finish!

Linking up to Finish it up Friday at Crazymomquilts, and