Sea Geese Quilt

This quilt is officially the quickest quilt I’ve ever made — I went from fabric to finished in only 6 days! The fabric is all from Heather Rosas’s Under the Sea collection and it’s made of 8 oversized flying geese blocks, hence the name “Sea Geese.” (Ha.) The quilt measures about 40″ square, which was driven by the width of the minky backing. To make that work, each flying geese block measured 20″ x 10″. I had ordered half yards of fabric before I really decided what I was going to make, which forced me to make the flying geese in a slightly unorthodox way — by cutting triangles for the corners and carefully lining them up, instead of cutting squares and trimming the excess. It required me to be a little more careful but worked out just fine in the end.

I hadn’t worked with minky in a few years, but remembered that the #1 tip for using it is to baste and/or pin very heavily to keep the slippery fabric in place. I used a healthy dose of basting spray and then pinned generously as a fail safe and had no issues. (#2 tip — don’t iron it, at least not directly and not on high heat! I pressed something I made a few years ago and when the minky got hot, the “bumps” flattened out and never bounced back.)

To make things even quicker, I used a self-binding technique on this quilt. There’s no batting between the layers, and the backing is just folded around each edge and sewn down on the front. I really loved the ease of this technique, although I didn’t really consider the fact that without traditional binding, you can see where the quilting lines begin and end on the back. Backstitching should keep the quilting in place, but it doesn’t look quite a clean as it would with traditional binding. (I considered not quilting at all, but wanted to add a bit of stability to the piecing.)

I put this quilt in the mail to a friend’s new baby earlier this week. I hope she enjoys it!