Bee Blocks: April

April was my month to be queen bee for one of the Baltimore Modern Quilt Guild's bees.

This bee is based on stash fabric, so members should be able to pull fabrics from their collection to create two 12.5" by 12.5" blocks (unfinished), or similar square inches of blocks. The blocks should not be overly complicated. (Do not download the image below, it is only an image and not a foundation. The foundation is linked in the text below the image.)

I wanted a gaggle of flying geese. I also wanted to make it really simple for everyone to make the blocks. I set myself the task of using EQ7 to make foundations for simple paper piecing, if that was something they wanted to try. They can also use their favorite method to create flying geese of the appropriate size. You can download my foundation to make your own flying geese. Make sure you print "actual size" and measure to make sure the outer line measures 6.5" by 9.5" before printing all your foundations.

I printed out my foundations and pulled some fabric from my collection. I'm not going to provide a step-by-step foundation paper piecing tutorial as there are so many out there. This one from Fons & Porter has nice video tutorial. I asked for five of these units from each of the bee members. This works out to one goose unit less than two 12.5" squares would be if sewn into squares.

I made two blocks using this method.

I also cut several flying geese units using my favorite rulers for this kind of work: The Easy Angle and the Companion Angle. Bonnie Hunter has some great videos about her ruler that does the same thing these two rulers do.

I didn't sew my geese units into blocks yet. I'm going to wait until I have the units from the other members of the bee so I can scatter mine around to give it all a little more uniformity.

A super-sized thank you to Jane at Projects by Jane. Without her tutorial I would have been lost and unable to upload and share this foundation for paper piecing the geese. Jane has loads of great stuff and patterns on her site so you should go check those out, too.