Migrating Geese made Fast and Fun with Deb Tucker

hi my name is Deb Tucker I'm here today to talk to you about making migrating geese and about one of the newest items in our web store our technique sheets we have a technique sheet that will give you the step by step directions for making said migrating geese all the way from one and a half inch wide strips to 15 inch wide strips the migrating geese is what you see on the quilt behind me it's what I used around the border it's one of my favorite techniques what I'd like to do to talk to you today is to walk you through the process what you see on the border are all triangles but what you start out with are all squares the squares that you start out with are listed on the chart and you're going to see two different types of squares what you're going to start out with Rd squares they're usually dark in color and background squares in this case they're going to be light in color these are five and quarter these are four and seven eighths to be able to make the strip the same size as the strip behind me once you've cut your squares now I do have to I do have to tell you do not round these squares up in many of my techniques I'm actually having you cut the squares a little bigger this is a precision cut technique there's no room for for rounding please cut this the strips even though it's that awful number of 7/8 please cut those squares that 4 and 7/8 inch measurement and the 5 and 1/4 do not round them up and use your best skills your best cutting your best sewing your best pressing skills once you've cut those initial squares what you're going to do is you're going to take each one of the geese squares and you're going to cut them in half diagonally from corner to corner again use your best skills then what you're going to do is you're actually going to take one of the background squares you're going to take one of the goose triangles line the pieces up so that they're raw edges are carefully aligned and then you're going to proceed to do something a little bit on you're going to stitch on both edges of that combination of square and triangle you can see here it almost makes a little pocket but you want to do a good quarter of an inch seam on both sides you have a choice you can either stitch each one individually or if you'd like you can do chain piecing when I do this I would chain all the pieces I like to stitch from the square end down and I would stitch the right side up with in one direction and then flip the piece over so that when I was stitching in the second direction I would still be stitching from the square end of the triangle to the pointed end of the triangle but doing it in a chain fashion it's up to you however you want to proceed but you do want to put that stitching on both edges of that square and triangle background square and triangle when you are done with the stitching the next thing that you're going to do is you're going to take each one of those units this is what it looked like when it was stitched but you're going to take each one of those units and cut it in half on the diagonal when you do this step and you cut them in half be careful put them in piles because it's very easy to get them mixed up and they're kind of unusual looking pieces but once you've put them in piles go to the iron and press them and I press them toward the geese but what you'll see is now you have right hand units and you have left hand units you're going to use those right hand units and left hand units to create your strip once I have a number of them the first thing you do in order to be able to start your strip is to unsewn you're thinking wait a minute I just sewed everything but what you want to do is choose either one of the left hand units or one of the right hand units and you're actually going to remove the stitching to create two individual triangles one will be a lone goose and one will be the lone background we're going to put the lone back round off to the side for right now and then what I want to show you is how this border strip is being constructed the first thing I'll do is take that lone goose triangle put it on the left then I'll be picking up a right hand unit then I'll be picking up a unit from the left left hand unit then I'll be picking up I don't want that one because it matches right-hand unit then I'll be adding a left-hand unit then I'll be adding another right-hand unit and you can see how this project is going to be built from south to north of the geese we're flying north and in braid fashion right hand left hand right hand left hand there are a couple things that you can do that are going to be very beneficial for you to be able to number one keep all those points on all those triangles and also keep your strip very nice and straight it takes a little bit of time but it's really worth doing what I want you to do on each one of your units your right hand units and your left hand units is I want you to mark a quarter of an inch future sewing scenes these are X's kind of x marks the spot to do that all you simply need to do is use some type of quarter of an inch guide it can be a regular ruler I like to use my quilters magic wand but then mark what where your quarter vanish seams are going to be by marking them here here here of course you don't have to mark them here because you already have the seam line there but mark those X's at those future sewing points it's going to again help you keep your strip nice and straight when you begin to sew the first thing you'll do is you take that lone triangle this is the first right hand unit that we're going to stitch to it and we're going to flip that over and what you're going to do is you're going to align the square edges now this piece had a dog ear on it I trim that off so that it lines up nice and straight and I'm going to actually add stitching I flip this over and I've actually added the stitching going down in this direction once I've added that stitching that seam wants to go be pressed this way go ahead and let that seam be pressed to the south every other scene is going to be pressed the way that the geese are flying so this is what we had we flipped it over we did a partial stitch and press the seam going in this direction now we're going to proceed to add a left hand unit picking that unit up clean off the dog ear that's at the ninety degree so that when I flip it over I'm going to have the 90-degree corner lining up and the 45 this is an easy one just put your quarter of an inch stitching in there and you're going to have piece number two added and when you have stitched that make sure that you press that seam and every other seam going north these are spring geese and again they're going north when it comes to adding the next unit that goes on to the right hand side this is where you want to pay attention to those x's you'll flip this over and what will happen is the square corner will line up but there's no real easy match point down here simply put a pin put a pin through the X here through the X here and what will happen then once you have that pin there and you do your stitching when you open this up what you're going to find is not only will you have all the points on your triangles but your edges will be nice and straight I'm going to pull out a piece here that you can begin to see I'll continue to add my units in the same manner adding a right hand and a left hand but what you can notice is that all of the edges because I've done that pinning are nice and straight but I want to talk to you at just a quick minute or two about finishing off your strip when you've added enough geese and your pieces long enough the bottom is pretty easy when you go to the bottom what you'll simply do is trim a straight line across there give you a straight edge when it comes to the top of your project what you're going to do is go back to that lone back round triangle that triangle is going to fit on to this edge you still have an empty gap here you can't grab that triangle from the bottom doesn't have enough seen in it seam allowances on it to be able to fit there so you'll go back to the chart to our technique sheet you're going to see the individual size square that you need to cut so that when you cut it in half it's going to give you a half square triangle that you can fit right on to the end of this and then you will have a nice straight finish come back clean up your dog ears along the edge and you're going to be ready to add your migrating geese strip - your future quilt projects I hope you've enjoyed this little segment on how to make migrating geese I hope you'll look for our technique sheet at our webstore and I hope to see some migrating geese on your future projects enjoy

Channel: Deb Tucker's Studio 180 Design

Views: 115,519

Rating: 4.9173837 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, studio 180, v block, rapid fire, tucker trimmer, wing clipper, hunter's star, hunters star, square 2, square squared, lemoyne star, Deb Tucker, Studio 180 Design, Migrating Geese, Technique Sheet

Id: jkIboL_fyaY

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2012