Geese in the Forest

About a year ago, there was a really fun quilt that became popular in the quilting world. You can take a peak at it here:

Liberty Print Quilt

I bookmarked this quilt because I absolutely loved the way the color moved through the quilt, and I thought the different shape triangles were so endearing. Plus it wasn’t “perfect”, which is right up my quilting alley. I wanted to make something similar to this one day, even though I had never attempted triangles before.

As I said, this quilt was very popular in the community at the time, and one of the quilters on a blog I follow, Twiddletails had decided to do a free pattern for a quilt that was inspired by the one above. She called it “Geese in the Forest.”

The quilt had 6 paper pieced blocks that would be arranged in such a way as to look random and really does have the feel of the original inspiration. She offered each pattern up for free for one month, and then for only $1 after that. You can find them all still for sale here. I grabbed them when they were free of course as this was perfect for what I wanted to make.

Geese in the Forest (GITF) was designed with green and red in mind, but I was still inspired by the colors in the Tokyo quilt, so I went searching through the fabric that I had. A long time ago I bought an ‘Around the World’ pattern along with enough batiks in green and blue to make a king sized quilt. I never actually got started making that quilt, and decided that the batiks would look great in this design. I grabbed all the ones I thought played well together and arranged them from green to blue.

I then printed out the GITF picture and made a template for how I wanted the colors to run through the quilt. I used crayons and a numbering system to help me keep track of where I wanted each fabric to go.

This pattern helped me keep track of my colors because as I said, she released one block style a month, but that block was placed all over the quilt, so it wasn’t as easy as making all the blue blocks first, then green etc… My colors were all over the place, so it was important to keep track of which ones went where.

Here are the first 6 blocks I completed:

I have done more of them, but I haven’t taken a picture lately. (I will do that sometime soon). The quilt isn’t even close to done, but I figured it would be one that I would be working on for a while. The paper piecing takes a long time to do, so I would say each block probably takes me an hour or two. I pull it out every so often and do a few blocks, so at least I feel like I am making progress. I am just hoping I don’t run out of fabric as none of the fabric I am using was actually bought for this project, so I am not sure if I have enough!

Happy Quilting!
Rachel