Alice's Migration: Flying Geese!

Two ideas occurred to me for this quilt.  One simple, another more complicated.  Waiting until this week to work on my quilt, I thought the simple plan would be most practical.  But alas, simple came out looking simplistic.  Even childish.  So I laid it aside and began working on complicated.

The old traditional Flying Geese quilt block design was my second notion.  But I wanted something more flowing, more swooping, more like how geese actually fly.  Google came to my aid and I came across a tutorial by quilt teacher Gail Graber for constructing flying geese along a curve.  Her step by step instructions were just what I needed.

First I drew the design, using a tool I've had for years but never before used--a flexible and curveable ruler.  Of course it took much trial and error before I came up with a design that I liked.  Once I did, I copied it onto drawing paper.  This was my master.  I then used regular printer paper to trace the design for paper piecing.  

Some years ago at the Houston Festival I bought four or five different half yards of an amazing fabric that has gradations of colors along its width, from dark to light and back to dark.  I used several pieces of this fabric for this quilt.  I knew I wanted my current quilt's background to be blue, so for the flying geese I chose a fabric for the "sky" part of the flying geese that, interestingly, had gradations that moved from yellow to orange to deep red and on to a dark red purple.  I did put in a few pieces of darker violet for the bottom few flying geese.  For the geese themselves, I used a gradation from lightest purple or lavender to dark violet.

When I started the paper piecing, I paired a light goose with the darkest "sky" background, then moved around to a dark goose with the lightest "sky" background.  Once the paper piecing was done (and I had tediously removed all those tiny pieces of paper!!) I decided to use reverse applique to apply the curving flying geese to the quilt's background fabric.  For this I used another piece of that gradation fabric that was primarily blue moving through pink and then purple.  Again, Gail Graber came to the rescue, as the second lesson in her series about making curving flying geese included excellent instructions for the reverse applique process, which I had never done before.  I bound the quilt with the same fabric I used for the quilt's background.  

Links to Graber's instructions:  

https://betteroffthread.com/2013/06/11/paper-piecing-curved-geese-a-tutorial/

https://betteroffthread.com/2013/06/18/reverse-applique-tutorial/