I'll start by telling you a story of how I took my toddler into Anthropologie during our Milwaukee trip. Hubby had to make a call into work so we entertained ourselves by browsing the stores. Anthropologie's clothes are out of my price range, but I always find that the pieces they carry are unique and inspiring. Unfortunately, in addition to clothes, this store also sold lots of little breakable things. Things like candle-holders, that were stored at toddler height. I thought I had my little toddler under control until one of those candle-holders was on the floor in pieces. I sheepishly brought the shards to a saleswoman, who was dismissive about my offer to pay for it. "Don't worry, it's just breakage" she shrugged. Still, I felt compelled to make a guilt purchase and so I carried Destructo around the store a bit looking for something small. A tin of garden-themed postcards fit the bill and we paid for them while entertaining the other shoppers in line with us.
Now I know you will think I'm silly for making that guilt purchase, and I completely agree. But, if I hadn't gone to the cash register, then I wouldn't have seen this on my way out.
Are you thinking what I thought? Is it something like "GEESE! What a cool thing to do with geese!"? Of course it is, because we're quilters and you can't turn that off even if you just paid $10 for some postcards. I took a picture with my phone and we hurried off to torment other shops.
I thought for a long time about how to get some slightly irregular geese into this arrangement with the least amount of work. There were lots of crayons involved. And daydreaming of owning quilt design software. And what I came up with was not a goose at all. It was on-point squares with a triangle in each corner. So simple! So doable!
Six rows of that became...the Golden Goose.
It is 53 by 58 inches. I am quite happy with it. I like the way the geese sometimes overlap and other times "float".
The yellow is Kona "banana" and I know that because I made a couple cutting errors and needed to go find more. In normal circumstances I would have just used another yellow but I really really wanted the on-point construction to be sort of a "secret", not to hit you over the head right away. I quilted it with free form vertical wiggles, to mask the diagonal construction a bit too.
The back uses some scraps and this big piece of strange fabric from "Blank Textiles" that I bought two years ago. There wasn't a designer listed on the selvage (I checked! That's a first!).
I gave it a stripey binding, which seems to be the only kind of binding I can contemplate at this point in my life. I wonder what I'll think of all my striped bindings ten years from now?
So there it is. The Golden Goose. My second quilt finished quilt of 2010. I had thought this would be a baby quilt for my little niece due in two weeks, but then I remembered my sister hates red (say what?) and uh.... there's a lot of red up there. So maybe I'll sneak in a third quilt under the wire before 2011. Deadlines are good for people like me.
