Star Surround Quilt - Flying Geese

After I worked on the Half Square Triangles last week, it was time to use some of the other cut pieces to make a bunch of flying geese.  How many geese will be in my flock? 192!!  Holy moly.   This week's work is based on the following link from the official Quilt Along (it's over but i'm still trucking along): http://happyquiltingmelissa.blogspot.com/2013/08/star-surround-quilt-long-flying-geese.html

Let me preface this post by saying I made a HUGE rookie mistake that caused me about 8 hours of rework.  I'm not going to tell you what it is yet - any sewers reading this should be able to figure it out immediately from the pictures.  Trust me, you don't need to see the pattern to see what I did, LOL. 

The quilt along suggested a method for the flying geese that I hadn't done before.  It was similar to how we did the Half Square Triangles but I've never done this to make flying geese.  You basically lay two small squares on top of a larger one.

Have you seen the mistake yet?  Well let's keep going...after pinning, i sewed a quarter inch away from the diagonal line on each side.

Have you seen the mistake yet?? It's staring right at you!!  No?  Well let's do what I did and keep charging along.  Trim along all the diagonal line so that we have a total of 96 blocks.

So now it's time to flip over those gold triangles and press the blocks.  But wait...if I flip the gold triangles over...I'll be looking at the back of the fabric.  OH NOO...the awful truth settles in...I sewed 48 blocks (96 now that I've cut them apart) without the right sides of the fabric together.  It's wrong...it's all wrong!  <Insert multiple expletives yelled from quilt room>  What to do?  The only thing I can do - get out my seam ripper and rip apart EVERY block and re-sew them.  Fast forward 4 - 6 hours later and I have a stack of blocks, sewn properly.  See the pile of thread?  That's from ripping apart all the blocks.

Next we basically repeat the same process along the other corner and then we will end up with 96 x 2 = 192 Flying Geese Blocks.

So the lessons today are pretty simple, LOL:

1. If you're going to make a plethora of one block, make a sample block first to make sure it comes out like you think
2. Don't get so excited that you forget basic sewing conventions like sewing with right sides together.

For anyone that thinks quilting is always easy for me, obviously it's not, LOL.  But for anyone who hasn't quilted yet or is new - don't get discouraged!  It happens.  And like I always say, don't worry you can always rip it out.