Flying Geese and Blind Meece

Don't you think every quilt has a story, even the new ones? Which thought necessitates that a story can stem from the creation. Which, in this case, it does. I have wanted to make a red quilt. And, I've wanted to make a flying geese quilt. I am not the visionary type and never plan anything out from beginning to end. I don't know how something will look until I'm looking at the finished product. So, my projects are always evolving as the stages progress, and sometimes end up quite different than the initial feel. I saw a flying geese set-up like this in a quilt pattern book. It's a take on an old find. I added white, brown, and red borders and edged it in brown, gold, and red floral.

The back is brown and white. The large sheaf design is a piece from T's warehouse sale. It is bordered in brown and white mini checks. The whole quilt sandwich was stippled. The quilt store made some changes to my top and bottom. To make the back and front an equal size, they cut off the bottom checks on the back. I would have evened out top and bottom checks instead. I am fine with it, because it is homemade. Second, they took apart the front and made it an even square of geese. My square of geese slanted up at the bottom. So, there are changes to this I didn't make but I am happy with the end result and want to wear it in. I love an old soft quilt.

I made the flying geese square initially and my roommate thought it looked like Christmas what with the green in the floral stripes. Horrors, I thought. This is not a Christmas quilt. I added the brown and now, I don't think of Christmas at all. I did scallop the edges and like this look. It works since everything else is so linear. Linear like the V formation of geese.

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening To Art Blakey's Version Of "Three Blind Mice"
by Billy Collins

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

And how, in their tiny darkness,
could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife
or anyone else's wife for that matter?
Not to mention why.

Just so she could cut off their tails
with a carving knife, is the cynic's answer,
but the thought of them without eyes
and now without tails to trail through the moist grass

or slip around the corner of a baseboard
has the cynic who always lounges within me
up off his couch and at the window
trying to hide the rising softness that he feels.

By now I am on to dicing an onion
which might account for the wet stinging
in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard's
mournful trumpet on "Blue Moon,"

which happens to be the next cut,
cannot be said to be making matters any better.