Flying Geese from 5 inch squares - Quilting Tips & Techniques 011

hello today I'd like to show you how to make flying geese units from five inch squares this is a method I've used in one of my patterns called flying geese using five inch squares which is available on my website under the 5 inch charm patterns and wwm 1/4 comm so we're going to start out with some 5 inch squares and today I'm using some 5 inch squares that I've cut from some men's shooting fabrics a friend of mine had given me some pockets off some men's shirts and they were just the right size to get 5 inch squares out of so I've got a little stack of four squares here that I'm going to show you with and my background fabrics I'm going to use white today I've got five inch squares of the background fabrics as well so to start off with you need to trim your five inch squares just a little bit and because mine have got stripes and I want the stripes going in a certain direction up and down I'm going to trim off half an inch of one side of the five inch square so that they'll end up being four and a half inches by five inches so I'll take off that half an inch and now I need to cut them in half the other way so I'll turn that around and I'm using the markings on my board to help me lie on my fabrics up and I'm going to cut that in half so at two and a half inches so I've now got two strips of each of the squares that are four and a half inches long and two and a half inches wide on my background fabric which could be assorted fabrics but I've chosen today to just use white and I need to cut that into half in both direction so that I'll end up with four two and a half inch squares from each five inch square so again using my board to help me line things up cut them that way and I'll turn that around and line them up again and then cut them in half the other way so that I'll end up with two and a half inch squares and then to pop your corners on we're going to sew a square on to the each end of a rectangle so I would probably mark a line on the back of the square you might find on this size that you don't need to market you can see to sew a straight line from corner to corner but I think that markings can be very helpful in keeping it straight so I've actually done a few ahead so you don't have to watch me drawing lots of lines and I'm sure you can manage to do by yourselves and so what I would then do is I would take some of my background squares with the lines on them and my strips and I position this square on there so that the line that I've drawn comes from the bottom corner up towards the center and then I'm going to take that to the sewing machine and sew that on there along that line that I've drawn so start sewing right on the line then I'll get the next one and feed that straight in same thing from the bottom corner up towards the center with your diagonal line and I'm just going to run four of these through so that you get a good idea of what I'm doing I just love these shooting fabrics s so nice now I'll take those out just quickly clip them apart and back to the rotary cutting and now I'm going to just trim away the corner on the outside so the smaller area just so I'm going to line my rule I've got a quarter inch marking on my ruler which is very convenient I'm going to lay that on the actual stitching line and I'm going to cut quarter of an inch away from the stitching line and just trim that triangle off there and then I'm going to take these to the iron and I'm going to press them now because I've used white and that seam might show through I'm actually going to press the seam so that it goes in towards the colored fabric so to do that I'll lay down the white triangle first and holding this up I'll just pop the iron close to that and let that fold over as I press and then I get a nice flat seam with no seam showing underneath the white and now I'm going to come back with some more of these squares that I've got ready with the lines drawn on them and I'm going to sew them on the other end of the rectangle same thing with the point going out to the corner up to the center but this time because it's more convenient for feeding it into the machine I'm going to start at the center point and come out so that will overlap at the top so you can see they're quick and easy lots of things you can use flying is units for those of you who have lots of collections of five inch charm squares at home this is a great way of using up some different fabrics the background squares don't have to be all the same like I've got mine this time there'll be all different shades of the color again I'm just going to trim off the same as we did the other 1/4 of an inch away from the same line and these triangles you don't need those anymore unless you're into doing miniatures they're not really big enough to do a lot with and then back to the iron and again remembering to lay the white down first there's a little bit of bulk at the point but if you just take it gently that will just press down nicely and there we have our flying geese units these will measure two and a half inches high by four and a half inches wide so a finished unit when sewn into a quilt will be two inches by four inches a very usable size to go into all sorts of blocks as you can see here I've got some really delicious looking flying geese and I've got a quilt here that I've made but using the pattern that I mentioned before the flying geese using five inches and this is the quilt that I made from that pattern and here I haven't got the same fabric as the background I've use a variety of different light creamy colors for the background and the five inch squares cut in half for the geese so I hope you enjoy making those units thank you

Channel: GourmetQuilter

Views: 58,983

Rating: 4.9027948 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilting, patchwork, cutting, sewing, 5 inch, squares, flying geese, craft, tutorial

Id: NwCB-ZP-jwU

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 10 2013