Hey Everyone, welcome back to Mug Rug Monday on Saturday.

I was rummaging through a bin in the back room looking for a suitable backing material for a table runner when I came across a whole bunch of blocks and pieces that I had create in 2013 for Stash Blasting Wednesday.

Instead of putting them into the scrap bags that I have ready to go to my workshops next week for the ladies of the Durham Trillium Guild I thought I should use a few of them to create this week’s mug rug.

There were many to choose from in wide range of colours and designs.

I picked out 6 red and white flying geese pieces.

Several red and white flying geese pieces

The flying geese pieces

Since it is spring the Canada Geese have returned in full force and we see them everywhere. I love to hear them honking as they fly over. A true indicator of spring although sometimes their timing for returning is a little off and most things are still totally frozen. I guess they didn’t get the weather forecast way down south for way up north.

Flying geese units can be made in several different ways. They can be paper pieced, pieced with a traditional patchwork method using squares and rectangles or made with the no waste method. My favourite method is the paper piecing because the points are always perfect.

Flying geese unit

I sewed three flying geese units together to create each mug rug – yep 2 mug rugs this week. Well, what was I going to do with the 3 leftover geese units – hard to make something with an uneven number.

Three geese units together

I had a hard time figuring out what type of quilting to do on these mug rugs but finally came up with a plan. Simple straight lines in a Greek key formation within the geese works really well.

All quilted and ready to be bound.

Quilting done

Close up of quilting.

straight red lines in the white geese bodies

Close up of quilting

To bind the mug rugs I used my walking foot instead of my quarter inch foot so that I could have a rather scant ¼″ seam for attaching the binding to the top of the quilt. I did this so that I wouldn’t lose any of my points on the geese. Can’t fly with clipped wings.

The completed mug rugs which are 6 ½″ x 9 ½″. I figured the name of Canada Geese was appropriate for these two mug rugs since our colours are red and white and these are flying geese blocks.