This past Sunday I got together with my women’s book group. Our January book was Elizabeth Gilbert’s newest book titled, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. We had a discussion about what we need in order to be creative, and I shared that I need both time and space in order to get my creative juices flowing. If I’m feeling rushed or constrained, I fall back on what is familiar, and I’m not willing to try new things.

Recently I felt frustrated about the inconsistency of some flying geese I was making. Of the basic quilting units, flying geese is the one that gives me the most trouble. I really like how my paper-pieced flying geese turned out for my Summer Sampler 2017 Quilt Top and since I didn’t have an urgent deadline, I decided to search online for 3 1/2” x 6 1/2” unfinished paper-pieced flying geese to use for some Sawtooth Star pillows (see tutorial for Sawtooth Star Quilt by SuzyQuilts.) I remembered that one of the pattern designers for the Summer Sampler 2017, Faith@Fresh Lemon Quilts had written a post about making Flying Geese – Perfect Points, but all of her flying geese templates were too small. Quilter’s Cache had strips of flying geese which included the size I was looking for, and I made individual flying geese by just using the top and bottom flying geese (three were printed on the page). Then I decided to search again for individual flying geese paper-pieced templates, and I stumbled across Karen@Klee2string’s tutorial on making my own paper pieced flying geese templates. This was the first paper-pieced template I’ve made, and I was really excited to find out how easy it was to make one. It was pretty fast, and my flying geese turned out perfect! I did, however, find these units to be a little floppy and found that temporarily securing the edge with a paper clip or swipe of my glue stick helped immensely.

My One Monthly Goal for this month is to make three Sawtooth Star pillows using the flying geese I paper pieced, and I will also be binding my Summer Sampler quilt that I picked up earlier in the week from ThreadBear.

Linking up to Elm Street Quilts: Feb ‘18 OMG.