Here's how I draft my flying geese ribbons for my latest quilt project, Aurora Borealis II.
- Draw your ribbon and clean up the final line, add the horizontal lines.
- Flip over your drawing and draw the cleaned up lines on a new piece of paper (this step is so that your sewn flying geese ribbon looks like the drawing.) I like to use a light box but you can always tape your drawing to a sunny window and do it that way. Use a ruler to make your horizontal lines very straight.
- Find centers of the horizontal lines and mark with a dot.
- Connect the dots from one horizontal line to the next horizontal line's edges to form a geese. Once that's done add 1/4" seam allowance to the exterior edges. If your ribbon is longer than 18" you'll want to break it up into smaller sections for ease in sewing. If you do that remember to add 1/4" seam allowance to those ends as well.
- Sew your flying geese!
These are the fabrics that I've pulled for all of my flying geese (there's two ribbons of 31 geese each for a total of 62 different fabrics). They are mostly Kona solids with a few batiks and texture fabrics in a rainbow.
The first section that I've drafted used these nine fabrics plus a white fairy frost for the "sky" portion.
For an idea of what the final design is going to look like, I've placed this first section on the original design along with the NY Beauty round that I did last week. The geese on the right will go up and the ones on the left will point down. Tomorrow I'll draft another section and sew it before continuing on to the next one. I'll probably break this down into six ribbon sections plus the three interiors of background fabric - probably Kona Snow.
