New York Beauties and Flying Geese

I love foundation paper-piecing, and so when I saw that Carl Hentsch of 3 Dog Design was coming out with a new book called ‘New York Beauties and Flying Geese’, I knew I’d be making a quilt from the book.

I had a hard time choosing which quilt that I wanted to make, they all looked fabulous, but I finally settled on the ‘Sorbet’ quilt. I liked the various sizes of flying geese and the break up with solid pieces. Here’s Carl’s original Sorbet from the book:

This quilt finishes at 80″ x 80″ and requires 32 fat quarters as well as various background fabrics. I dug into my Tula Pink stash and chose 32 fat quarters – I sought to go with the colors of the rainbow in fabrics that were majority of one color (with minimal/small prints).

Carl’s suggestion in the book for numbering the fabrics 1-32 was spot-on, and after cutting out all of the fabrics, I stored each print in a separate Ziploc bag with the number written on it. I figure that this will be a long-term project, and keeping everything organized and easy to store will be helpful.

It took me a full day to cut out the fat quarters, and an evening to cut out the background fabrics. For the background, I used various neutrals designed by Alison Glass.

Here’s the first block that I made; for foundation paper-piecing, I use fusible applique papers from Hugs and Kisses so I’ve left my papers in (since they are water-soluble), but the parts of background fabrics have no paper attached to them, so some areas appear a bit wavy. I’m really happy with how this turned out and with the fabrics that I chose (because sometimes it’s hard to tell until you’re already into the project). This block took approximately 4 hours to piece (although I know the rest will be quicker if I am piecing all of one template at a time in all one color grouping).

I highly recommend Carl’s book ‘New York Beauties and Flying Geese’ – pick yours up now, or you can also purchase an ebook (which I found to be completely handy as you need to make several copies of each of the paper-piecing templates)!