11. New Flock of Geese and Assisted Marking

Yay! I’m finally back on track! It’s taken a few days to get life back to normal, but now it seems like everything should calm down…at least for a few weeks!

Let’s get started today by tackling an old / new design. Flock of Geese was originally inspired by Caryl Bryer Fallert’s quilt New Dawn. In this quilt paper pieced flying geese swirl into the center and along flowing lines. Basically seeing the triangles flow through curvy line spaces made me think of Chain of Pearls and how easy it is to stitch circles within 2 parallel lines.

So that was my inspiration when I sat down to stitch in 2009. But…I couldn’t quilt it! I could not capture either the look or feel of what I was going for and after 3 failed attempts, I just decided this would have to do:

When it came time to re-stitch hundreds of these originals for the book 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs, I knew Flock of Geese had to change. I decided to return to the original inspiration and see if there was any way to quilt it the way I wanted it to look. With a little assisted marking, this is what I could quilt:

That’s much more like it!

So what is Assisted Marking? Basically it’s using marking to work out a specific element of the design, but not marking the entire design.

With free motion, I find that there’s a lot of confusion about marking based on the questions I get every day. Yes, I do believe a true “filler” design should be able to be quilted with NO MARKING at all.

But there’s a whole giant bucket of designs that can be helped and “assisted” with a tiny bit of marking. In this case, marking the bases of each triangle shape allowed me to visualize the triangles better so I could fill the remaining 2 sides of each shape freehand. Without the little marked line, my flock of geese becomes a jumbled mess. With marking, I’m guaranteed a perfect fit and gorgeous design:

Flock of Geese stitched in Isacord Pumpkin Thread

 Now for the question I know you’re about to ask – how time consuming is it?

In all, it took around 3 minutes to mark all my wiggly lines and all the triangle bases within the space. That is not bad considering the hours of ripping that could have resulted if I had not marked this little bit of the design.

But as always, you don’t have to do this! I’m just honestly admitting that I cannot quilt this design as well, as perfectly, as prettily without a tiny bit of marking to set the path in motion.

So you can see what I’m ranting on about, here’s a video that teaches both the assisted marking and how to quilt over it with the complete design:

Have fun giving this design a try and make sure to link up with us on Friday!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah