Mystery Geese

Back to Easy Street with Bonnie Hunter this weekend...this week's installation was to make 128 teeny flying geese, finishing at 1.5 x 3". That's a lot of little pieces to cut, even using Deb Tucker's Wing Clipper ruler.

I had to commit to one of the colors this time, so I chose dark, dusty brownish purples. For some reason, I have a lot of scrap chunks in this color. "Purple" is, in my opinion, a nearly meaningless descriptor; fabrics that are loosely defined as "purple" never seem to look good with other purples; red-violet and blue-violet are completely different beasts, and I wanted neither for this project. I made a few sample geese just to check the coordination, and the fabrics I had pulled out looked very nice with the light tan backgrounds.

The rows of teeny geese look fantastic all laid out next to each other.

These aren't trimmed down yet, but I wanted to take a few photos before the sun set so I could use natural light.

When I put a few of the four-patches next to the geese, it started to have kind of a warm, rich, wine-country feel:

In terms of color selection, I'm playing this project by ear (wait...my ear can't pick color...I'm not on some weird quilting acid trip). Let me try that again: I'm letting the process determine the colors, and at this point I have a Tuscan countryside color scheme in mind. I'm thinking the next (main) colors will have to be deep olivey green, and a very dark gold/rusty orange. I usually work in brighter, more vibrant color, but I'm already starting to fall in love with my mental vision of this emerging project.

Photo completely lifted from the website of Roberto Carli, a photographer I don''t know, but who takes amazingly beautiful pictures.