Flying Free

I've been knocking around some ideas for my first ever Art Quilt for a while now and, since the deadline is looking a lot closer than it did when I decided to do-this-thing I thought it was about time I actually started doing something concrete about it!

I was thinking about spring and all the things that that brings to mind and one of my favourite things about spring is that the sun starts coming out and blows away all the wintery blues - I am definately affected by the weather and when the sun starts shining down and the rain becomes light and sparkly rather than heavy and dreary that's when my new year begins.

So, what am i choosing as my theme for the quilt? Flying Birds. I have a wonderful postcard which show a white bird flying over a vast blue ocean and to me that symbolises freedom more than any other image I've seen, but it doesn't seem to want to become a quilt! Too much bare space to fill in.

Instead I'm going with something I've been wanting to do for a while which is playing with curved flying geese. In a (hopefully not too groan-groan) twist I'm going to try and make a piece which shows traditional patchwork 'flying geese' metamorphising into actual flying geese.

I was going to piece it but that's obviously not going to work with actual gooses so instead I'm going with applique. I haven't quite decided on the background yet but I have drafted out my geese pattern.

I started out by drafting patchwork geese as though I was going to foundation piece them. I searched the internet for instructions on how to do this but failed miserably so made it up! In short:

1. Draw freehand curves marking out the area where the geese will fly; for the quilt I'm doing these diverged away from each other as the curve progressed.
2. Start at the base of the first goose; draw a straight line which averages out as a perpendicular to the tangent of the curves at its ends (by eye)
3. Now the math - I wanted 'proper' flying geese so the horizontal base should be twice the height of the goose. Measure the base line, find the middle and project a vertical line from the centre point which is exactly half the width of the base.
4. Draw the next base line, again averaging the perpendicular of tangent of the curves on either end.
5. Mark the slopes of the triangle of the first goose (connect the dots)
6. Repeat steps 2-5 for each goose. It's actually suprisingly easy to do!

Next I drafted out the geese gradually emerging from the triangles and finally I removed the triangles altogether to leave the birds breaking free on the constraints of the pattern.

Geese In Triangles

And Finally, Free Geese!

Now all I need to do is decide what colours the geese will be and what background they're flying on - for the geese I'm thinking some sort of chromatic colour progession and the backing will either be something pieced to get a bit of the traditional in there or something plain so I can do some quilting on it, not quite sure which would work better yet.

The geese will need to be redrafted so they're symetrical (the ones in the picture are somewhat wonky) and then I need to figure out the best way to applique them on. I'm thinking that reverse applique makes the most sense but I don't really want them 'sunk' so maybe something using bondaweb instead. Just need to make sure the edges are properly seamed down I think, would spoil the effect a bit if they frayed.... or maybe they should get gradually more frayed to show the feathers...