The Helen QAL Week 3 - Making Your Flying Geese
Welcome to Week 3 of the Helen Quiltalong! I hope you’re excited, because this week we’re starting to piece our flying geese. This is probably not anyone's favorite part of the process, but it is key to making those stars that we love!
If you’re still working on cutting your fabric, don’t worry — you can catch up at your own pace. But if you’re ready, it’s time to start turning those stacks of fabric into stars.
🧵 A Quick Progress Note
If you were interested in oversizing your flying geese or making half square triangles instead, I did put up a post last week with that information. You can find that post right here. As written in the pattern, you should only need to trim the dog ears off of your flying geese, they do not require further trimming.
Using a scant 1/4" seam allowance is very important in this block in order to get the correct size. You can find more info about scant quarter inch seam allowances at the bottom of this post.
✨ Flying Geese Instructions
If you’re using fat eighths, fat quarters, or yardage:
Follow the flying geese instructions exactly as shown in the pattern for your quilt size.
If you have directional fabric, you can find directions on keeping everything facing the right direction in the video below.
If you’re using scraps:
Check the “Scrap Option” section of the pattern to make sure your pieces are large enough. Scrappy flying geese are so much fun and add a lot of interest to the quilt.
YouTube Video
This week I recorded myself making two colors of flying geese for my quilt (I need to make 5 total colors). Follow along if you are looking for more guidance on how to make flying geese. If you have any more questions, email them to me and I will do my best to answer them in the Instagram Live video this week.
📣 Share Your Progress!
Show me your flying geese in progress! 🪿
Post your photos on Instagram and tag @kitchentablequilting and use #thehelenqal so I can see and share your work!
🗓️ Instagram Live Reminder
Join me Tuesday at 1pm PT on Instagram Live! I’ll be answering your questions about making flying geese (and any other quiltalong topics you want to chat about).
If you can’t join live, I will save the video to my feed so you can watch it later.
Next week, we’ll start assembling our star blocks — it’s going to start looking like a quilt soon! 🎉