Quick Tips: Flying Geese Save Your Scraps

When you're making flying geese the traditional way and you're doing it with a, a rectangle and two squares. It can be tempting to not want to use this method when you're getting up into bigger pieces like a 3.5 inch by 6.5 or something even larger, just because you have a lot of waist or excess fabric that you're trimming away uh when you trim off to create your flying keys. So I'm gonna show you a way that you can sort of stitch in extra line as you're showing your flying geese to where now you just have instead of a bag of scraps that maybe you're gonna throw away. You have a bag of already sewn half square triangles that all you need to do is press and square up and use those in a future project. So this would normally be how you would start is you have your rectangle and your two squares with your diagonal line going from corner to corner on your square. Now, I want you to draw another line a half inch away from your diagonal that goes to the center. So they should look like this instead. So it's gonna start just the same way you have your original diagonal line and now another line that's a half inch away. Now, we're gonna treat this just like your standard flying yeast construction. So I'm gonna take my square, put it on my rectangle with right sides together, make sure everything is lined up and I'm going to stitch on my first diagonal right here through the center. Once I had that one stitched, I'm just going to uh clip my threads. If I was chain piecing a bunch of flying geese, I could still be chain piecing all of my flying geese on this first drawn line first and then go back and stitch on this second drawn line. I'm gonna go ahead and trim my threads there and now bring in my pressing mat because I always like to press my flying geese first before I trim off any excess. So I'm going to do that by folding up my square, making sure it's a line on the upper and side edges and give it a press. Then I would of course attach my other side to my other side of my flying geese. But I'm just going to show you with this side here. But now when I go to trim away the excess of my flying geese rather than just having this as scrap. What I'm going to end up with is now an already pieced half square triangle that I can then just press and I'm ready to use this in a future project. So if you're getting into bigger sizes of your flying geese, consider using this double line marking or double marking line method so that you come away with not only your flying geese that you want, but an extra half square triangle already stitched, ready to go and then you can knock out another project really quick in the future.