Bee,Myself & I in February

You didn't really expect me to be back in under a week after completing two flimsies did you? You should know better than that by now. 😉

Bee, Myself and I was instituted by Granny Maud's Girl as an excuse to work on a project for yourself that you might otherwise put off in favor of making something for someone else. I'm taking this opportunity to share with you a project I've begun for 2020. Actually, I started on it back at the end of October last year. This is just the first time I've shared it publicly.

Long-time readers may remember the diary quilt I created by cutting a strip a day for a year.

This is the flimsy. I can't find the picture of the completed quilt. 😒

I really liked having this ongoing project. It gave me a little something to sew, or at least cut, most every day. The strips worked well as leaders and enders too. However, I didn't want to do the same thing all over again.

Late last year I started making "families" of flying geese for a version of the Remixed Geese pattern and enjoyed that process.

They also work well as leaders and enders - the way I make them (the old fashioned way, by cutting a large square, quartering it, and using half-square triangles for the background patches). I have enough families of these geese now for a quilt top, I just haven't had the mental stamina to set the units together. But they helped me come up with the idea to make a family of geese for each week of the coming year. 😀

I started with Halloween (an especially favorite holiday of the year for me), followed by Dia de los Muertos. Most of the rest of the families represent projects I worked on during that week. This effort may go on for more than an exact year. I haven't been able to work out how many families I need or want or what size quilt I want in the end. I'm pretty sure I'll be setting them in long rows or columns though. I'm cutting 7.25" squares for the geese and 3.875" HST's for the backgrounds. That results in 6" x 3" flying geese units. The only other "rule" is to keep the background patches in light values and the geese dark. This is what I had at the end of last week:

The earliest family is the strip down in the lower left hand corner. I'm determined to keep them in chronological order one way or another. Unfortunately, this layout doesn't look very promising. I may do this instead:

But we have a long way to go before that decision really has to be made. In the meantime I had to find a way to keep the families corralled and in order. Hubby was given a pair of slippers at Christmas and happily, the box had not been recycled. It's the perfect size to accommodate the growing stack of stips of geese. I also have a little journal in which I'm recording the date and why I chose the prints I did for that week. I figure that will help me sort the families out if they get mixed up along the way.

And as they say on TV, "But wait! There's more!"

I have begun yet another flying geese quilt top. Same size geese, and no specific design plan yet. All I know for sure is that I'll need 240 of these units to begin with. Makes for great mindless sewing. 😊