October Flying Geese and Pumpkins Completed

This post continues my work, many my FMQ, on the October banner from the Pieceful Patchwork Banner for October from Shabby Fabrics that I assembled in my previous post. "Quilt as Desired." That phrase used to strike fear in me but not so much now. I break down these wall hangings into sections and try something different in each area. I also mix up ruler work with free-hand, not just for variety in the quilt, but also for my own sanity adn skilll building. 

Flying Geese
For the orange and black flying geese bodies I used Angela Walters' shape by shape inspiration and her ruler Slim to denote direction. I wanted the pointed angularity to give a sense of motion and to echo the V-shape in the sky of migrating geese. I would address the cream speckled sky later. I used this same ruler in the pumpkins, leaves, and stems. It is my very favorite because of the convenient hand-held size, the light and dark lines, and the 45° guidance indicators.

Pumpkins Proper
For the pumpkins I wanted to call attention to each central sawtooth star so I echoed around its outer edges. I planned to go ½" apart but I goofed and so was committed throughout to ¼" spacing. That was a lot of dense quilting that I felt obligated to repeat in the second pumpkin. I chose not to go so dense in the pumpkin center. I've been told that one of the rules of quilting is that there be equal density throughout, but I flaunted that guidance.

Leaf and Stem

The grid fabric of the green leaf seemed to call out for a grid quilting. I explored that option at first, but then decided I preferred a veined approach for the leaves. For the adjacent stem, vertical lines could have been appropriate like the stem on a real pumpkin. Instead, I chose to echo the diamond from the pumpkin center below. I auditioned my options on a clear page protector with a dry erase marker, then overlaid them on the top itself for the final decision.

Thin and Wide Borders
Using an orange thread in the thin inner border, I stitched a zig zag using the concave right angle of the Handi VersaTool. 

For the wide outer border, I stayed with the orange thread and used the HQ Wave E template, the steeper wave side. The curvature seemed to work out well with the scale of the haunted mansions in the border print.

Background and Sashing

For the background and sashing I switched to a cream colored upper thread but left the orange in the bobbin. I reasoned that even if my tension did stray, tiny bobs of orange peeking up in the speckled fabric would be OK. Orange top stitching would have been a distraction. By the time I got to the background and sashing I wanted to give my ruler concentration a rest. I did my standard arcs free-hand in the background triangles of the flying geese blocks. The arcs are hard to see but they do give texture and do not distract from the geese. I did loops in the striped sashing using the wide black lines to guide my spacing. 

For around the pumpkins, meander at first came to mind, but that is still not my strength. The theme of loopy tendrils at the top of pumpkins gave me the inspiration for doing a meandering loop. The meandering loop is in the same thread as the background so the imperfections are not obvious. Non-smooth glitches are still there but they are passable while I continue to practice my meandering.

The non-smooth glitches show up more clearly on the backing as well as my slightly imbalanced thread tension. Uneven tension bias was intentional on my part. I'd rather cream bobbles on the back rather than orange bobbles on the front. The next two photos are front and back close-ups of the same area of pumpkin. The stem can serve as a source of orientation. I need more practice to get smoother.

Labels

My grosgrain labels were black thread on orange grosgrain ribbon read DIC_OCT_2026 and FLYING_GEESE_AND_PUMPKINS. As is my tradition for these banners, the OCT stands for the theme month and not my month of completion. Here are the labels before and after attachment to the quilt corners.

 

Completed Banner
The completed banner measures 31" x 31" and will be hung outside my sewing room doorway come October 1st. For completeness I have also shown the back with the hanging sleeve.

Here are my completions thus far for this series from Shabby Fabrics.

• JAN    Snowmen and Snowflakes (2/10/26)
• MAR  Shamrocks and Irish Chains (4/6/26)
• APR   Bunnies and Carrots (3/6/26)
• MAY   Roses and Pansies (9/11/25)
• JUN    Strawberries (9/6/25)
• JUL    Flags and Pinwheels (6/24/26)
• AUG    Bees and Sunflowers (9/21/25)
• SEP      Log Cabins and Schoolhouses  (8/5/26)
• OCT    Flying Geese and Pumpkins (this post 8/26/26)

Three more to go. I am really looking forward to the November banner, which has acorns!

October Flying Geese and Pumpkins

The theme for the  Pieceful Patchwork banner for October from Shabby Fabrics is autumnal. There are two Flying Geese blocks (... call to mind migrating birds...?)  and two Pumpkin blocks. The color tones are subdued oranges, charcoals, and blacks like Halloween but not particularly garish or scary or witchy in theme. As usual, I cut out the fabrics and organized the pieces in my tray with Alphabitties. I used blue Alphabitties for the pumpkin blocks and black Alphabitties for the flying geese blocks.

Flying Geese Block
The instructions were for making the flying geese by attaching speckled-cream squares, which are the sky, at four corners of a larger color square which is the birds body. This method yields four flying geese rectangles at a time with very little waste. There will be no bonus pinwheels for me from the sew and flip method for flying geese that yields one rectangle at a time. I happened to have in my tools the Bloc-Loc Ruler to make 3" x 6" flying geese. Sewing and trimming by this method made short work of generating 16 flying geese units, four each of a black/speckled-cream or orange/speckled-cream color combination. I also put into service my rotating mat to speed up the trimming. 

These 16 units are joined into two 8-unit blocks. The blocks have opposite polarity of the center pinwheel and they will go in opposing corners of the banner.

Pumpkin Block
Each pumpkin block has a saw tooth star at its center, made from flying geese units. The instructions called for a finished flying geese unit to measure 1½" x 3". The closest sized Bloc-Loc ruler I had was for 2" x 4" finished. That was OK. I used only the top edge where the point was to get that edge accurate using the ridge feature of the Bloc-Loc ruler. I trimmed the bottom edge using a regular ruler so that the height was 2". Then I trimmed to two side edges, once again with a regular ruler to measure 1¾" out to each edge from the center, giving a 3½" width.  Yes, having the desired size Bloc-Loc ruler would have been easier, allowing trimming all four sides without switching rulers. But Flying Geese Block-Locs are pricy, on the order of $40 each. They are certainly worth the convenience for making many units but I had only a few to make and so I improvised. I had two saw tooth stars to construct, each needing four flying geese units.

After adding orange borders to the top and bottom of this star, central to the pumpkin, I then used the flip corner technique, chain stitching to efficiently add on a yet different orange background corners. Once I fed one star through, I fed the second one through without breaking thread, repeatedly bringing the rear star around to the front. The cut off corners however were too small to make bonus pinwheels. I suppose I could have. but the effort would have been extreme for the small finished size.

When I used the same flip corner technique to add the speckled cream background corners to the full size pumpkin, I was able to salvage the four corners from each pumpkin and have two pinwheels as a bonus.

The stems I made one at a time because I wanted them to be mirror images and I was afraid I'd get confused if I tried both at once. The second photo shows the two pumpkins as reflections of each other.

I added a striped sashing between the blocks, satisfied that both the flying geese blocks and the pumpkins blocks had mirror images in diagonally opposed positions on the banner. Aa a last assembly step. I add the inner charcoal and outer black borders.

Next up is the sandwiching and quilting. Then I will add the labels, a hanging sleeve, and finally the binding. I have to remind myself that for these banners, the assembly of the top takes me less time than the quilting and completion. Once I acknowledge this fact, I become more patient about the time commitment to finish the final stage. I consider my self primarily a piecer, and only secondarily an FMQer.

Pumpkin Pleasures at Wooden Gate

I got an email from Wooden Gate Quilts that they were having a sale on Fall fabrics. This pumpkin print caught my eye since I like to collect pumpkins of different materials and patterns and sizes. I bought online and paid for 1¼ yards to make two 22" square pillows, planning to make the trip to the store nineteen miles away a couple days later to pick it up.

Wouldn't you know it, the day I went to pick up my fabric there was a trick or treat Halloween event at the Danville Livery Shopping Center where the quilt shop is. It was a zoo and parking was a challenge but it was kind of cute to see all the kiddos meandering around in costumes. As a fuddy-duddy, I would not have chosen to go on that day; but thrown into the situation, it was a pleasant diversion I most likely would have tried to avoid. The horse team got priority over my parking spot.

Browsing the store I got a couple more items other than the yardage I had pre-paid for. This book, Modern Halloween ©2107 attracted my interest and was included in the fall sale so I bought a copy. The prelude read

Halloween isn't meant to be cute. Leave that for the Easter Bunny. Or at least Halloween for adults doesn't have to be cute. There will be no smiling bats wearing pink hair bows here. Halloween is the one time of the year to embrace the spookier, scarier side of things. The designs in this book are for the modern and mature Halloween enthusiast (doesn't that sound official?) Really, these are projects that can add a unique seasonal touch to your home without making it seem like you have decorated the place for a preschool party.

I am happy with smiling and whimsical pumpkins that can do dual purpose for Halloween and Thanksgiving, even as a grandma. I paged through the book and did like the clean lines of some of the patterns. I was going to get a second copy for my daughter but decided instead to hold off until I saw her at Thanksgiving and see if she wanted a copy. As I browsed Amazon to get a screen grab image for this post, Amazon informed me I had purchased this book before. I immediately felt guilty and careless if I'd already purchased it and stashed it away, forgetting about it. Then I checked the detail of the order and realized I had sent it directly to my adult daughter in Oklahoma in June 2019. She, her husband, and kids are into the ghoulish and zombie type of Halloween. My daughter and I laughed about the book over the phone today, and she was going to look for it first thing when she got home. 

At Wooden Gate's fall sale I also picked up a plush, squishy, fuzzy, pumpkin in a peachy orange. It is the one in the foreground of the next image. I added it to my collection already on the hearth. In the image after that, I typically turn those two jack o' lantern pumpkins on the far right around to face the wall so they do double duty at Thanksgiving. I hope their feelings are not hurt but I would think they would prefer an extended stay on the hearth to plastic bin time in the attic.

Determined not to stash away the pumpkin fabric and forget about it, I order two 22" pillow forms from Amazon. I already had two 18" zippers so I was all set to make up those pillows right away. There would be little waste or leftover scraps since I'd gotten just the right amount of fabric. But I thought the selvages were so cute with the row of itty bitty pumpkins that I did not want to throw them away. I was able to salvage two rows and decided to place them diagonally across the top corner of each pillow. I cut ¼ " away from the white section of the selvage and used that as a seam allowance. Then I flipped over the strip and stitched very close to the edge with white thread, below the dotted black line, leaving the bit of fuzzy fringe intact.

The diagonal selvage bands came out cute but small relative to the entire pillow. Next time I do this I will cut a longer strip of selvage, even if the text shows, so it will be farther down from the pillow corner and more visible.

The two pillows are now deployed on either side of my hearth. I expected the pale gray to play a larger role. But the dark gray is dominant enough that the pillows have more of an orange/black Halloween vibe. I do love the plaid of the pumpkins, though.

Oh, by the way, I did buy two patterns from Etsy, one for sewn pumpkins (Kim Kruzich) and one for knitted pumpkins. (Marie Mayhew). Oh, well. Maybe I'll get to them next year. They look like fun.

Savage Quilter with My Daughter

After the Quilt Show in Oklahoma at the end of July 2023, Robin and I did a quick mini Shop Hop to one of her neighborhood stores that I like to visit whenever I travel out to visit her from California.  It is called Savage Quilter and is a well organized shop with color walls by hue around the perimeter for convenient fabric browsing.

I needed to curb my purchases to the limits of my suitcase but I did indulge in some retail therapy. I bought a few fat quarters in an attempt to quench out my orange binging. I also added a couple patterns and a panel. I seem to have a penchant for pumpkins and red pickup trucks with trees. These pumpkins have that peeled back rounded technique of Southwind Designs that I enjoy. These trucks are slightly more unique since they are carrying gifts and not trees.

The panel just seemed to call to me even though I have a drawer full of them. When I bought it, I reasoned with myself that I could use it on the back of a holiday quilt.

But now, after having seen this treatment for a panel at the Brentwood Quilt Show in September 2023, I am wondering if I could be a bit more creative with a judicious choice of fabric in just the perfect colorway. I enjoy pinwheel blocks and they could help put a cute "spin" on this panel. Picking the right fabrics in pink, aqua, and gray-brown, for a winter scene, would be a real blast! It is, after all, a winter scene, but not necessarily Christmas.

That's all for now. My list of want-to-do's keeps growing but is is so much easier to just dream and blog about it.