Easy Street Part 2

Hi Everyone!

If you are checking back for my Easy Street update, welcome back!  If you are here for the first time, I hope you enjoy my blog.  For all my regular reader friends, I'm so glad we are friends!

The next step in our mystery is to make flying geese.  I love flying geese!!  First up, fabric.  Bonnie was using purple this time.  Her purple equals my...

 

Medium Blue

 

 

We were to make flying geese with the purple/medium blue as the "goose" and our background as the "sky" units.  Bonnie's geese technique involves using the Easy Angle and Companion Angle to cut both pieces from 2" strips.  I had never tried this technique for making geese and I found it very effective.  I love that you can cut it all from the same size strips.   Bonnie has a great tutorial and video in her Easy Street Part 2 blog post.  If you are interested, click on the Easy Street photo to the right.

 

If you haven't yet started this step, here is an important tip:  Don't layer the two different sky units together!  Keep them in separate piles!!!  Good grief, I feel like I spent way more time peeling them apart than sewing.  It was really driving me nuts. 

 

When I sew geese units, I always prefer to start from the "peak" point and work down to the skinny bottom angle.  The first sky units are easy, you just match them and sew.

 

 



After pressing, when I sew on the left sky triange, I will match it up...

 

 

...flip it over...

...and then sew.

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if I start sewing at the skinny point, it sometimes likes to get caught up in the machine.  That isn't good.

I thought the units went together great.  I didn't have any problem, except for the "unpeeling" of the sky triangles.  In case you don't know what I mean, Bonnie instructed us to layer two strips right sides together and use the ruler to cut both at the same time so you have one triange and then the mirror image for the other side--in this technique you have a '"left sky unit" and a "right sky unit."  If I did it again, I would use half the strips face up and cut and then use the other half of my strips face down to cut the reverse piece.  Then I would have piles of "rights" and "lefts."  The piecing would go so much faster. 

Remember last week when I shared some of my "tedium relieving" quirks?  With these geese I employed another one:  the reward system.  The reward system  involves some sort of small treat, Wheat Thin crackers maybe, or M&Ms.  This time it was the crackers.  Once I achieve a certain goal, like sewing the first triangle on my target amount (50 or more,) I can have a cracker.  Once those 50 are pressed, I get another cracker, etc.  Another fun "treat" is a sip of wine.  After awhile you don't notice the tedium any more!  In fact, you don't notice if you are sewing correctly or not!  Neither do you care!  (Until the next day.)  That's why I don't use that reward too often.

Anyway, once both sky pieces were stitched, and the dog-ears clipped off, I had a nice pile of flying geese:

I'm loving the colors!  Oh, and I can't forget to show the rectangles.  One more set of instructions said to cut 64 2" x 3.5" rectangles for a later step.  I easily got those cut while doing the "sky" triangles.

I have one more thing to share.  This weekend I finally got my husband to work on putting out the outside Christmas decorations.  It isn't that he wasn't willing until now, it was that he has been getting home so late from work every evening.  We joked that he hadn't seen the house in the daylight since last weekend, and it was true!  Anyway, you know how some people have those light-up deer for their yard?  We have moose.  Three of them.  One of them we got on clearance the last Christmas before we went to Hawaii.  The moose and most of the decorations stayed on the mainland in storage, so we hadn't used this moose yet.

This moose came out of that box.  Can you believe it?  My husband got it out and put it all together.  I'm impressed, but I'll be more impressed in January if he can fit it back into the box.  I'm guessing that he will, but it will be fun to watch.  Do you know how most people are good at a lot of things, but there is usually something people are really good at?  For my husband, it is folding things to fit into small containers.  He excels at packing (I think it comes from having to pack Army gear all of the time) and especially at putting things back in their original packaging.  As a military family, we save all the original boxes for most of our stuff: TVs, mixer, collectible figurines, microwave, even the shop vac has it's original box!  (All those boxes fill a good part of the attic.  We joke that we are going to have one big bonfire when we finally settle somewhere!) 

I hope you all have a great day!
JoAnne