Liberated Flying Geese Tutorial

I'm always on the lookout for liberated techniques and concepts that can be listed in my own Liberated Quilting: Free Patterns, Blocks, Ideas and Tutorials section of my blog. What I wanted was simply liberated geese made "on the fly" from scraps.

Ones that I have seen are usually either paper pieced, such as the style used in waves and circular patterns, seen on the cover of a popular book (which I don't own) or they use rotary cutters and same size blocks to then create more random pieces as in popular liberated quilting books.



I wanted a truly random, free-pieced technique that was neither sketched out, nor paper pieced, and only used scissors for cutting super random pieces of fabric from my scrap bags. And since I couldn't find anything online where I saw someone doing this,everyone is paper piecing and I wanted true liberation ;) So, I did it myself and took some random photos of that process!

As you can see, no pre-cuts, no rulers, no mat, no rotary cutter...just some fairly raggedy strips and pieces and truly random piecing..but it worked and it was great fun! I'm sure when I'm working with a bigger sized piece I will have more 'in flight motion' but for now, I was happy with a little random line across the top of my little art quilt.



Step 1. Grab strips and pieces of fabric, and sew your first seam. I would sew and cut as I went along my pieces...always just using scissors as I sat at the machine.


Step 2: Flatten out first "sky" section, prepare center section for sewing on the second one.


Step 3: Grabbing a random bit, sew it on at an angle on the other side of the center section. Remember nothing has to, nor should it be, straight or perfect!


Step 3: Flatten out this other 'sky' section and get ready for the next goose!


Step 4: Switching colors now...so a sky color on top of a different colored scrap of goose!


Step 5: Sew the first goose to the second goose...finally, we have flying geese!


Step 7: Keep on making geese and seaming them to the previous one!

Step 8: You can cut straight across if this new raw edge bothers you but you don't have to. Just keep making geese and sewing them together to the flying chain if you want to!



Step 9: Three geese looking for a nice gander!


Step 10: Here he comes...how about an orange one. Notice how he's a scrappy little fellow, a bit raggedy but he joins in just fine!


Step 11: There he is..a fine feathered fellow!


Step 11: Keep going, in fact, it looks like he jumped ahead of the line now and is leading the flock!


Step 12: But another one got added to the lead position and now we're really off and flying!



Ahh, there they all are...a whole gaggle of flying and completely liberated flying geese! And don't they look good with liberated pieced curving strips and other random piecing of my little art quilt? They truly are great fun!

Oh dear, looks like a cat is near by...and I think he sees those geese ;)

Gaggle of geese...pedal to the metal! You're heading for the AAQI Liberated Challenge!

Liberated Quilting: Free Patterns, Blocks, Ideas&Tutorials

Links to my Liberated Flying Geese in this tutorial plus regular, 3D and other more traditional flying geese:

Liberated Free-Pieced Flying Geese
Flying Geese Tutorial3D Flying Geese Tutorial
Flying Geese Tutorial using a ruler technique
Color Wheel Flying Geese..paper pieced, in a circle[PDF]One Seam Flying Geese Tutorial