Star Kisses Block - Honey Pot Bee

This week's challenge was the Star Kisses block. This block features flying geese, which are made similarly to half square triangles. Instead of matching up two squares, the flying geese are made with a rectangle, which one sews two squares to, diagonally, one at each of the long ends. It ends up being a rectangle with a big triangle in the middles, and two smaller right angle triangles, one on each side of the larger one. It is - and isn't - harder than the half square triangles. Making the geese wan't bad, but getting the points to show as points, but not float too far off the seam is a challenge, but a different challenge than getting all the half square triangle points where they should be.

I picked three fabrics that I liked together, and went to cutting, cutting, cutting. I chose where I would like my paisleys to end up. Not exactly a fussy cut, but definitely not random. As I made the flying geese, I sewed a second, smaller half square triangle from what would have been discarded. Some of the quilters in the bee had done so, and they were very cute.

Mini pinwheels

I knew that the small scale would not make me happy, but I tried them anyway. After all, the bee is a learning challenge, and you can't learn if you don't try. Some of these meet up better than others. My plan is to alternate these pinwheels with a solid color and make to narrow "filler" blocks for the quilt. I feel like these small half square triangles fall into the "waste not, want not" category, but they are definitely not my thing.

Once the geese were made, the construction of the block went along pretty well, and while my block is not perfect, it is certainly recognizable as a star kisses block. I have now made flying geese. Yay, me!

check out those paisleys

On the one hand, I have a fondness for a trellis type design, and I think these blocks would make a very nice over-all design. On the other, I can't say I'm fond of making the flying geese, and I'm not sure I would want to make a whole quilt from them. I suppose they would have gone more quickly and easily if I had not been making the secondary smaller half square triangles, though.