Flying Geese is a well known and much loved block among quilters. The pattern is fairly easy to make and can be arranged in other ways beside the traditional Flying Geese quilts. I like darker backgrounds, and thought that “Night Flight” (or a Flying Geese quilt) was a good description of geese flying through a night sky.

According to some books in my personal library, this setting is called “Dutchman’s Puzzle”.

 All the “geese” in this quilt are Jinny Beyers fabric that I had a stash of. Add solid black fabric for the background. I put a lot of hours into this quilt and it was finished from start to finish in 2008.

Making the “Geese”:

For this quilt, I started with 5″ squares. I drew a line diagonally and then sewed a generous quarter inch on each side of the line to make 2 half square triangle (HST) pieces that I matched and sewed up the center to make each “goose”. Yes this is a time consumptive, but I prefer the accuracy and less stretching of the triangles.

In order to put the design together, I simply laid the pieces out like a magazine photo I had seen.

I used to spend a lot of time working with triangles, but over the past 10 years or so I have gone to using the half square triangle method because of the accuracy, and the way triangles tend (for me at least) to really stretch out of shape, which is means a lot more squaring up to make the blocks fit.

When I show other quilters how to make these Flying Geese blocks, I use this method. The size can be adjusted easily to any size triangles desired.

Backing and Machine Quilting:

The backing is not a match to the front at all. In fact, I think it is a super ugly fabric (my own opinion). This fabric was on sale for a great price and is good quality cotton. Another plus is that it was on hand. The budget would not stretch enough to cover another back, and the machine quilting.

Finished size is 100″ square.

Machine quilting is an all over cloud design by RLM in July 2008.

Binding the quilt:

The binding is 2.5″ strips cut from the leftover Jinny Beyers fabrics. It is sewn into a long strip, and ironed in half (1.25″). I machine sewed the raw edge down on the front, flipped it over to the back and hand stitched down.

Here is another view of Night Flight (or a Flying Geese Quilt) completed. The black background makes the “geese” shine.

Challenge yourself:

Pick a simple pattern like this one, and adjust the size to what you would like to work with. Work through the pattern using the photo of the quilt you chose as the guide. Most of all, have fun.

Here are two links to other info on Flying Geese quilts –

https://indianaquilter40.com/the-great-migration-quilt/

https://indianaquilter40.blogspot.com/2010/04/flying-geese.html

PLEASE NOTE: 
ALL PHOTOS AND WRITTEN CONTENT ARE MY OWN UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.