Mini Masterpieces – Flying Geese Mini Quilt

It’s so much fun when a blogging buddy releases a book!

Alyce from Blossom Heart Quilts, a fellow Aussie quilt blogger, released her first book at the end of 2019. It’s called Mini Masterpieces, and as the name suggests it has a lovely array of mini quilt patterns for you to sew.

The projects start with simple blocks and progress to more complicated blocks. Each project teaches you about the base block before introducing you to the mini quilt that can be made from it. It’s a lot of fun, with a lot of variety to choose from, and very educational to boot!

Where to buy Mini Masterpieces

If you’re in Australia/NZ you can buy the book directly from Alyce here. (Recommended given how slow international post is at the moment.)

If you’re elsewhere in the world, you can find the book here on Amazon*.

When I joined Alyce’s book tour she allocated me the flying geese block. I did a post on the block in 2019 and you can see that over here.

Today I’m showing you the mini quilt pattern from the book made with the flying geese block. You can see the flying geese mini quilt in the photo above – it’s the rainbow one in the bottom left corner.

Whenever I’m asked to make something from a book for a book tour I take it as a personal challenge to make something as different as possible from the example in the book. (But still using the pattern, obviously!) I figure it’s as good as showing you how to make a different quilt from the same pattern – and everyone loves a twofer, right? Right!

My fabric choices

I decided I wanted to create a very low volume background from most of the flying geese and add a couple of colourful, statement blocks.

This entire mini is made with Alison Glass fabrics. The background is a grey and white low volume, with solid white geese.

You’ll notice that my background geese don’t always follow the small-medium-large order that Alyce has in the book. I’d like to say that was a design choice, but it was actually because I messed up the order. I chain pieced about 5 blocks and then realised my error, so I made the decision to let it be. To be honest, I quite like it like this! (I made the same number and sizes of flying geese as per the pattern, it’s just my order of sewing them together that was rogue.)

The colourful blocks were a proper design choice. I pivoted two of the flying geese trios to face each other and create that middle diamond shape.

Quilting the Flying Geese Mini Quilt

I mused over this for a while. I originally wanted to try some hand quilting but I didn’t have any suitable blue/green perle cotton on hand.

What I did have, however, was a nice little collection of almost-spent blues and greens in my machine threads. This mini quilt was the perfect opportunity to clear out some of these not-enough-for-a-big-project spools.

Because I had so little of the lime and green threads left, I used my standard light grey thread in the bobbin. I then used the lime/green bobbin remnants for top thread as well as the spools.

I love a meandering, wavy quilting session. It’s very therapeutic creating the wavy lines and it’s virtually impossible to get it wrong.

Here’s a short video of my wavy quilting technique:

(If you pay attention you’ll see I messed up a little and lost grip on the quilt for a bit. This method is so forgiving that you can’t even notice on the quilt. I love wavy lines!)

I used all my colourful threads over the colourful flying geese portion.

For the areas of low volume flying geese I used light grey thread – visible but subdued, like the background.

I really like the effect and think it turned out rather nice.

My backing was a yard of Kona in Peacock that I found in my stash (purchased from Pink Chalk Fabrics, back in the day).

Binding the Flying Geese Mini Quilt

For binding I chose another Alison Glass fabric in a vibrant cobalt blue.

I wanted to be sure to get a cross section of all the colours in the fabric around the quilt binding. If I had cut my binding strips from selvedge to selvedge (cross grain), they would only contain a single emblem colour. Instead I cut the strips on the lengthwise grain so the strips contained some of each colour in the pattern motif.

I included a little snippet of the lime green flying geese fabric in the binding as well.

I sewed this binding on using my zigzag binding technique. It’s a quick, easy and very secure binding technique.

And here’s the completed mini quilt. A very modern flying geese quilt pattern. It’s quite a big ‘un, finishing at 30″ square. This could easily turn into a baby quilt with another couple of rows of flying geese or a border.

I hope you enjoyed seeing what I made with Alyce’s new book.

If you’d like to sew some minis yourself, be sure to grab a copy of the book either in Alyce’s shop or on Amazon*.

Happy sewing!

*Amazon affiliate link – thank you if you purchase through this link. It helps offset my hosting costs.

Share or Pin for later: