Well, I had contemplated this design choice for the center of my quilt:

 

 

And wasn’t sure about the size of the flying geese.  I even made up about 20 smaller geese (about half the size) and that looked so horrible that I didn’t even bother to take a picture of it.

I decided to play around with placement of existing block components that I already had – four patch units, two patch units and the other unit that have the two opposing corners on them (I don’t know what they are called)…

Here’s my first candidate… Not bad, not bad at all:

Next candidate is a little different looking – kind of echoing the X design of the blocks…

Third candidate is very similar to the first – can you spot the difference?

Fourth candidate is getting closer – but I didn’t quite like the uneven octagon shape it created in the center:

And the final candidate – and the WINNER – is:

It works on all levels for me.  The symmetry and still enough white space to set off the House block.

I had to orient the House block so that the visual center of it was in the middle instead of being bottom heavy (and basically touching the surrounding design on the corners).  I have pieced the block together here:

See how I shifted it up vertically about 2 inches?

Here is how it will look in the center of the quilt, less the shrinkage:

After staring at the wrong side of the fabric for so long, I really enjoy laying out the blocks and seeing the rich colors and the mix of them together.

I’ll be piecing the center rows together this weekend now that I have about 50 of my signature blocks back from the kids.

I hope you have wonderful holiday plans for the weekend, quilting or otherwise.

Happy Easter!

Jennifer