Fly, my pretties! Fly!

Guess what? It’s another update-on-my-first-quilt post. (It’s not all quilting today though, there are a couple of non-quilting things right at the bottom, in case quilting ain’t your thing feel free to just skip down there.)

This week’s assignment for the Starburst Quilt-a-long was to make flying geese. (Which, as it turned out, took nowhere near as long to do as the last two assignments!)

When they were halfway done, I noticed they looked a bit like cute cat faces. Don’t you think so? (So naturally they had to be photographed lying in the grass, just like real cats.)

Got to practice my chain stitching again. And can I just say – chain stitching is fabulous! It makes me want to production-line my garment sewing, just so I can utilise it more. (Mmmm…. production line of circle skirts….) I’ve also discovered that when chain stitching on both sides of a centre line, there’s no need to clip the threads between doing the left side and doing the right side. Instead, just pull that pile of chain stitched items around from the back of the sewing machine, turn it 180 degrees clockwise, and you’re ready to do the other side. Nice and easy, saves time as you can then clip both lines of stitching at once, and as an added bonus the first line of stitching pulls the rest of the pieces through so you don’t need to fiddle around with feeding them in quite as much. Win all ’round!

Here are my finished flying geese. I paired them up so you can see some of the combinations that will be going together (from left to right).

And here’s Paula! She’s the Pieces of Us project creation for this sewing post.

(Think she looks familiar? That’s because she’s the sister of Peter, who was in a blog post yesterday.)

Want to see what I’m going to be working on next? It involves this fabric (from the lovely TJ at The Perfect Nose):

And a pattern from this book:

And it’s going to be posted next Thursday as part of Sew Grateful Week.

(Or that’s the plan, anyway!)