Hen & Chicks August Block 1 - Aunt Dinah's Choice

 

I really have to wonder who Aunt Dinah was. Is her story written down somewhere? I found several variations of this block. Many of them had an extra square in each outer corner, I might try it that way sometime as it would give a nice secondary pattern when all the blocks came together in a bigger quilt. I also found versions where my flying geese unit was a quarter square triangle. That would make a nice pattern too, but somehow it wasn't what made it into my sketchbook  Again, something to think about for next time! There are always more quilt blocks to make in the future. Now that I look back through all the variations, maybe this isn't Aunt Dinah after all. It is what I made in any case, and I like it a lot, whatever the name.  

Use the HST method of your choice. I will use the flip and sew method for the flying geese. It isn't the method I usually use, but in smaller sizes, the waste of the flip and sew bothers me a lot less. I was pretty nervous about tiny geese, but they turned out pretty well and weren't as hard as I thought. 

Draw lines from corner to corner along the diagonal of the orange squares. Place one each (right sides together) onto the right end of the background rectangles pointing up toward the center. Sew ON the drawn line. 

Fold the corner open and press, check to make sure the edges all line up and feel free to trim any extra bits making it wonky before cutting away the extra fabric beneath the block. 

Repeat the same procedure for the left side to make four adorable little flying geese. They should be the same size as the rectangles you started with.  

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Trim away the extra bits from behind again. Feel free to make bonus bocks from these little bits if you like, I don't usually do that unless they are a bit bigger. 

Now pair those flying geese with the light orange rectangles so that the oranges meet and the background fabric is unattached.  

When you sew these two rectangles together, make sure the pieced goose is on top so that you can see where the seam is in relation to the point. This helps a lot with getting sharp points. The new seam should go right through the X of the two seams as they cross.  The pieced subunit should be a square the same size as your HST units and center square. 

The layout begins with the HST in each corner with the orange pointed in to a center background square. Very "shoofly" so far. 

Now just add in your freshly pieced side units to that the light orange touches the center square. This lets the dark orange make a nice frame around the edges.  

Now sew your nine patch and press the seams toward the unpieced center block. I think the dark orange had a nicely three dimensional feel like some sort of little origami star. I'm still not sure if this is an actual Aunt Dinah block, but I will definitely make it again.