Bird quilt squares

[gratiana]

Comments

[grace_poppy]

Thanks Gaby! That's reassuring.

Ganso! I just KNEW this "gan" was behind it all. ;D

[snakey]

These are lovely! - the gannet has such a wonderful expression. *also loves gannets* They also get called solent geese, which makes sense. And there's ganders, of course, who have the "gan"....

(Btw, in Scottish Gaelic goose is gèadh, geòidh in the plural. Just to confuse the issue.)

*isn't Stephen but attempts to be useful*

[snakey]

Also, what's foundation piecing? *knows nothing of quilts*

[grace_poppy]

Well, it's pretty cool. Instead of cutting out pieces and sewing them together like a normal quilt, you have your design traced onto a foundation piece of fabric, and you sew other fabrics to it, following the pattern. Like, see all those tiny pieces, triangles and weird shapes? Like the gannet's beak? It would be a CAUCHEMAR to try to cut all those pieces to the exact dimensions, and fiddle with them to make them all fit, etc., but it's much much easier to sew them onto a foundation that's already planned out

[snakey]

Ohhhh that makes sense. Raven made me a quilt like that once. :D

[dreamybritactor]

I LOVE the Puffin one! Puffins are such cute animals. :D

[gratiana]

Thank you! I love puffins too. We got to see so many, and so CLOSE to us, when we were on some of those really remote islands. They were just barely nervous around people, so they wouldn't let us get closer than 4 or 5 feet. But they were so cute, and so much smaller than I'd expected, like the size of a mango or a baked potato. I'd love to hold one! And they moved around like little clockwork wind-up toys!

[ozfille]

Your quilt squares are definitely not tacky. They are quite lovely in fact and I'm sure your mother will appreciate them.

St Kilda looks such a wild place. I assume you visited the island on your cruise. Stephen would have loved it but would not have appreciated the locals killing the puffins for snacks and eating the gannets or horror of horrors killing the Great Auk. But then the islanders obviously had very few food sources. I've seen a cruise of the isles featured in a brochure by a tour company that specialises in adventure and nature cruises and am so tempted to go. They also have an outrageously expensive cruise to places like Tristan da Cunha and St Helena and other very rarely visited islands in the South Atlantic and tours to Kamchatka. From the pictures of Kamchatka I could imagine if Stephen could have visited there he would be in seventh heaven. *g*

[gratiana]

Thanks! I've spent so much time staring at them that I just didn't KNOW any more

[gratiana]

And oh, all the amazing ancient archeological things we saw! I saw my first souterrain on St. Kilda, and I got to crawl inside! It's an iron age Celtic underground stone passage. They're not sure what they were used for. I also got to see a newly discovered... cavity thing, hollowed out from the rock, which was also very ancient and unknown. OH I WANT TO GO BACK.

[ozfille]

I love the Hebrides, particularly the Outer Hebrides....we camped there in the summer and slept in ruined blackhouses and saw fantastic wildlife and it was So. Much. Love.

I love crawling into souterrains and creeps and fougous and anything else undergroundy. Must be the snake in me.... *reminds self to find pics of him entombed at Kilmartin*

[ofenjen]

You did a great job with your first foundation patterns. Adapting patterns is the first step to designing your own! I'm sure your mom will really love them.

[gratiana]

Thank you! Yes, I feel like I could design my own now! I feel like the world is mine to conquer now, with foundation piecing! :D

[ofenjen]

paperpieced is a place to share original patterns if you decide to start designing. :)

[gratiana]

Oh, thank you! :D