Flying Geese Quilt Finished

 Remember the Flying Geese top I was working on back in April, using these fabrics? 

I had an opportunity to quilt it at the end of May and now it's a finished quilt. 

I loaded it sideways on the long arm and quilted straight-ish lines in the ditch and through the points of the geese. It was my first time trying ruler work on the long arm. Very awkward. 

My intention was that the long arm quilting would hold everything together and I could come back on my domestic machine and quilt all the horizontal lines in the ditch. That would have resulted in much denser quilting, making the quilt stiffer.  This quilt already has a stiff batting, so I opted to only quilt in the ditch horizontally between the tall blocks.  There's enough quilting in the vertical channels, 3" apart, so it'll hold up just fine, and hopefully this quilt will soften up with washing. For charity quilts, whatever batting they have is what gets used. 

The backing is a mint green tone-on-tone print from the club's backing stash and the color is perfect. I used the backing off-cuts for the binding. 

This quilt will go to the local agency for victims of sexual violence, whose clients tend to be a lot of teens and tweens. At 60" square, this quilt should be suitable for one of their clients. 

I enjoyed working on this project. The palette was a challenge for me to use lower contrast than I usually do, and I was partially successful. But I reverted to my usual stronger contrast and ended up with the mix you see here. It was also a retreat project, and it's always fun to work on projects at retreat. The girls there helped me lay out the blocks, another part of the challenge. 

Link ups: Alycia Quilts, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Wendy's Quilts and More, My Quilt Infatuation