The Gosling....

This little quilt is another baby sized quilt for Clare's Retro Baby Quilts market project and I think it fits the 'retro' tag splendidly. Not only the muted fabric colours, the traditional flying geese design but also the 're-use' story behind these little geese as well.
Some time ago (a couple of years at least), I started 'Stashbuster' a kaleidoscope quilt from Material Obsession Two. It called for lots of strip scraps to be made into the kite shapes and then topped with a range of spotted fabric triangles. I was way out of my depth attempting this very tricky quilt. Not only trying to understand the sewing technique of the 'y-seam' (which back then I didn't even know was called a 'y-seam') but the subtle art of fabric selection.
I had chosen a wonderful array of strips from my stash (then just a fledgling pile!) but the spot fabric I'd selected, whilst all matched each other, were way too dull for the rest of the fabrics.
After attempting the piecing, which was a complete disaster, I blamed my inadequate sewing skills and threw the whole thing in the back of the cupboard. But really, the dot fabric was just as much to blame for not proceeding.So a couple of weekends ago, I pulled it out of the cupboard, put on a DVD and started unpicking all the triangle tops from each of the blocks. There was only 80!
So with 80 'Depression Era' spotted triangles I selected some of the red, green, blue and brown and pieced cream triangles to them and formed them into flying geese. It was a bit tricky but not as tricky as I thought. Once I got the placement of the corresponding plain triangle it was easy chain piecing from there.Funnily enough, but I'm sure not unusual, the back was the catalyst for the front. This was a very discounted piece of fabric that I picked up in the recent Spotlight sale. It's even named 'retro'. It features the same colours as the front and was the foundation for the whole quilt. What I didn't realise was that it must have also been a display piece of fabric, wrapped back onto the bolt for the sale. When I opened it out to measure it, I noticed that it had a zillion staples in it. It must have been stapled gunned to the wall! So I pulled them out and then noticed that there were a few rips here and there. After a bit of careful cutting and piecing in a bit of red solid, the Gosling has a rather nice little back.
The quilt is free motion stippled and the binding is the red and white check from DS Quilts from her first range for Spotlight, Picnics & Fairgrounds.
I finished handstitching the binding last night so I'm linking up to Crazy Mom's 'Finish it up Friday'!