Birds and Kites
Penny Halgren

Did you know that January 5th is National Bird Day? I just discovered that, sounds like a pretty fun holiday. I enjoy my love bird and I am sure that every once in awhile, if you have listened to a lot of my videos, you can hear her in the background. She likes to talk to me and I kind of enjoyed the chatter. In any case, in honor of National Bird Day, I decided to make this block, called Birds and Kites. It is kind of a continuation of some of the weird shaped triangles that I sewed the other in our Happy New Year blog. So, it will be a great add unto that block.

This is Penny Halgren from QuiltBlockLibrary.com. I hope you will join me in watching how I sew this Birds and Kites quilt block together. I am ready to get started, let us go.

This is a four-patch quilt block and each of these patches is the same, so you can see it is divided up. There is one patch and their facing different directions, but they are all the same. So, I have cut my fabric out and I laid them all of the patches just stacked up, because I am going to sew each of the patches together. And then, once I get the patches sewn together, I will lay it out as the block is going to get some together.

So, the first challenge here is figure out how to sew these together, so that it will make some kind of sense and you do not end up sewing sudden seams. So, the first thing that I am going to do is sew these together, these two patches. And then just exactly on the opposite side, I am going to sew these two little patches together, the triangles, and then I will sew these together as a unit and I will attach all of them. So, the first thing to do is make sure that we are going to sew these right sides together, and you can see I just folded my fabric in half as I cut it. So, I need to turn it over, so the first thing I am going to do is just place these two triangles, right sides together and I will just go ahead and stitch down and I am going to stitch all of these and all of these.

Now, I have these two triangle sets sewn together and so I am going to stitch these together and it does not really matter whether I start here or here, but the idea is just to fold these right sides together and so these triangles are on to the center of diamond. I started at the top, so I got these--the diamonds sewn on to the top triangle, and now I just need to add the bottom triangle on. And again, make sure the right sides together, so I am just going to fold that up and stitch the bottom ones one.

Now, I am ready to sew these patches together and I am just going to fold the top one, down this way, so that these are right sides together. And, you can see that is going to fit together, kind of different. You need to make sure that your ends here are lining up and to whatever degree possible, you can match your seam allowances here, so that you have got nice crisp corners, where your triangles meet. That is not it, but it is going to take awhile for me to make sure that those are matched up and then, I will put a pin in it before I sew it. In any case, I am going to attach the sides here to the center.
]
Now, I have got these two sections sewn together, I just need to add this one and it is the same idea, just fold it down right sides together and in my case, it helps to fold the seam allowances in opposite directions. And then, because this fabric is so light, I can actually see through where this bottom seam allowances, in order to line up these corners on the triangles. So, you are just lining them up, stitching.

Now, the patches are sewn together, so it is time to lay them out as they need to be sewn together to make the block. So, it is pretty easy actually, since they are just four patches. The two opposite corners go the same direction, and those two opposite corners goes to the same directions. So, now what I need to do is sew the top two together and the bottom two together. And then I am ready to sew the rows together. So, I am just going to go ahead and sew these and match up the top seam and the bottom. And then this, I am going to try to make whatever I can possible to be in the center of that, just so it looks like it is lined up.

Okay, I have got the top two patches on the top rows sewn together and the bottom ones. So now what I need to do is fold this down and stitch this final seam.

So, our birds and kits block is finish now and this is was a relatively easy block to sew together, although I have got to tell you I had a hard time matching up my points. I need to be careful, because there are a lot of bias seams in there and it is just a little bit tricky, but I am sure you can do a great job sewing this block together. You may want to head on over to NationalBirdDay.org and check out all the great activities for birds on January 5th for National Bird Day.

In addition, if you are not already there, head on over to QuiltBlockLibrary.com, where you can get your free download of this birds and kites pattern. This is Penny Halgren, thanks for joining me, happy National Bird Day. Oh and of course, peaceful pissing.