Dotted Flying Geese Quilt

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I always had a vision for this quilt – using only dotted fabrics of all sizes and only in black and white. I used great big dots and pin dots and everything in between. It made a very modern, bold quilt. Normally, I don’t like to make flying geese blocks because there’s so much wasted fabric but in a future post, I’m going to show you how to make them using a no-waste method.

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I thought about putting these flying geese on a white background but it seemed a little too stark. I then pulled out one of my all time favorite fabrics from Zen Chic – Ink Modern Background in Grey. I paired this with Robert Kaufman Kona Solid in Silver and randomly made all the backgrounds in the blocks from these two fabrics.

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The flying geese themselves were made of many different dotted fabrics from my stash. I wasn’t able to identify every single dotted fabric but here are some that I know and are a favorite, in case you are wondering what some of them are: Jumbo Dots by Loralie Harris – if you don’t know her line of dotted fabrics, check them out! So very fun and inspirational. Another dotted fabric I really love is Hello Bear Firefly in Whisper, an Art Gallery Fabric.

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The finished quilt is 55″ x 61′. Each flying geese block was 3″ x 6″. I made 180 blocks. I made them using Bloc Loc rulers, which I’m going to write about in a future post. This method made these blocks very easy to make and very accurate.

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For the backing fabric, I wanted to keep the dot theme going so I chose a fabric from Robert Kaufman’s Spot On collection in Steel. It’s a 108″ wide fabric, perfect for a quilt backing. It was the perfect color and complement to the front, I thought.

For the batting, I did something very different. For this quilt, I pictured a heavy, warmer quilt than just the regular layer of cotton batting. But I didn’t want a tied quilt. So I took a chance and used two layers of batting and machine quilted it. It worked great! And I ended up with a nice, heavy, more substantial quilt. Very warm. I used two layers of The Warm Company’s “Warm Bond” quilt batting. It’s an 80/20 batting, which they are actually discontinuing. But I heard from The Warm Company and they say they are working on a new 80/20 batting, which should be available this November.

I ditch stitched the whole quilt because I just couldn’t picture a good quilting pattern that would look right on the flying geese. I used a light gray Aurifil 50 wt thread on the top and a darker gray in the bottom, to match the backing fabric.

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For the binding, I just had to give the quilt a little pop of color with all that grey, white and black. And the binding had to be a solid – no stripes or patterns. There is just way too much going on with the quilt itself. But which color? After trying several possibilities, I ended up with the Kona Cotton Solid in Caramel. I just love how it looks on the quilt.

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