At the March meeting of the Cincinnati Modern Quilt Guild, those of us participating in the Traveling Quilt/ Round Robin fun exchanged blocks. One lucky person got my shark block (well, maybe not so lucky–someone at break told me that she thought it looked pretty intimidating to add to), and I received a block from someone else.

This is the block I received from Kay. She asked that all the blocks have a white background and that they include green and blue flying geese. The blocks could be any size, and she didn’t care whether they were joined to her block or not. Easy enough!

It didn’t take me long to decide to make my go-to block: Circle of Geese. Yes, I’ve made it a bunch of times. But it works for so many occasions. And I’m getting pretty good at making it!

My first idea was to use printed fabrics for nine of the twelve geese and then outline the remaining three with embroidery floss in blue and green. You can see where I did the embroidery on one goose and took it out. The embroidery didn’t have as much weight as I had hoped, and the block just wasn’t working for me.

Then I decided to play around with some of the solid fabrics in the Robert Kaufman jelly roll I got for Christmas. I pulled out all the blues and greens and organized them from lightest to darkest. Just for fun, I alternated blue and green for each goose, moving from light to dark for each.

I liked this much better, but I kind of didn’t like how the tones ended up very divided, with the lights only on the right and the darks on the left. So I added a border strips of the lightest blue and the darkest green to balance it out a bit.

This block is a bit smaller than Kay’s block, so I won’t attach it. And that way she can keep the borders or not or do whatever she likes with the block.

I’m glad that came together quickly, so I don’t need to worry about it. But now I won’t get the next block to play with until the May meeting—rats!