Flying Geese Mini Quilt.....

As some of you may be aware, since the beginning of the year I have really been practising hard to improve my free motion quilting and I have had some success.  I showed you recently the finished quilt I had made using the free motion quilting exercise blocks from a Craftsy class that I have been following taught by Christina Cameli.

I also showed you the quilt I finished following an online Quilt-a-long shared by Lori Kennedy of the Inbox Jaunt.

I was really pleased with both these quilts and with the progress that I have been making with my free motion quilting generally. I have regularly been making a free motion quilted block here and there which I am going to make into another quilt-as-you-go quilt when I feel I have made enough blocks and, this has been more good practice. 

The idea for this quilt comes from Christina Cameli's first book which is called 'First Steps to Free Motion Quilting'.

These projects have all been invaluable to helping me improve but, I really wanted to try quilting something that I had pieced from scratch and was a bit larger than the practice blocks I have been making.  With this in mind, I planned out and pieced together a small quilt taking inspiration from a quilt I had seen somewhere (don't remember where) some while ago and, which I knew would have the prefect amount of piecing and negative space to practice my quilting on.  I call it my flying geese quilt and I finished it this weekend.

I am delighted with how it has turned out.  I quilted it in sections using four different quilting patterns.

In the bigger open areas I used two different quilting patterns. An all over spiral (above) and a 'beads on a string' pattern (below).

Between the flying geese blocks there were smaller rectangles of space which I quilted using pebbles.

Finally, in the background of the flying geese blocks themselves I densely quilted using closely spaced lines.

I didn't quilt the 'geese' at all and this dense quilting next to them has the effect of making them puff out a little.  I love the overall texture and it was a fun little quilt to make!