Confetti Quilt Tutorial - The Best Scrap Buster Quilt

I recently wrote about the scrappiest scrappy quilt I've ever made, that I had nicknamed the Confetti Quilt, and then turned into three mini charity quilts. Here's a quick and easy tutorial on how you can make these quilts from your own scraps, with easy to follow steps.

Printable Tutorial

If you don't like to keep the computer or tablet open next to your sewing machine, this tutorial is available in the pattern shop in a condensed, printable PDF format with diagrams. It includes all the information from this blog post except the photos, and contains additional block and quilt sizes for the Confetti quilt.

Making the basic blocks

The Confetti quilt is made up of simple HSTs and Four-Patch blocks made from 2.5" squares and 5" squares. You can use your scraps, or a combination of scraps and Mini Charm packs and Charm packs for this.

Making a Four-Patch block

You will need (2) 2.5" squares in your main fabric, and (2) 2.5" squares of background fabric.

Place the top background square and top main fabric square right sides together, sew, then press the seam to the dark side. Repeat this with the bottom main and background 2.5" squares, pressing the seam to the dark side as well.

The seams are now pointing to the left for the top unit, and to the right for the bottom unit in my example.

To sew them together in the middle, place those two units right sides together by flipping the top unit down onto the bottom one. This way the background fabric of the top unit is lying on the main fabric of the bottom one, the main fabric of the top unit is on top of the background fabric of the bottom unit.

Nest the seams and pin. I took this picture after sewing the seam, and you can see that my nesting shifted under the machine, so the purple and blue fabrics don't touch where I'm holding it. They should be butted right up to each other, which is why pinning is important.

Sew them together to form a four-patch unit.

Press this seam open to reduce bulk, and trim the block to 4 1/2" square if necessary.

Making Half-Square Triangles

The 5" squares are used to make half-square triangles using the two-at-a-time method.

You will need one (1) each of main fabric and background fabric.

Mark a diagonal line on the wrong side of one of the squares.

Place this square on top of the other square, right sides together. Sew a seam 1/4" on either side of the drawn line. Unfortunately my line was a bit too faint and didn't photograph well.

Cut on the line between the seams.

Then open up the HSTs and press the seam.

 

Trim the HSTs to 4 1/2" square.

Making the Confetti Baby Quilt

Since this was a trial run of a pattern doodle I had in my bin of scraps, I started with a baby quilt. I like using baby-sized quilts for pattern trials because they give a good idea of what the pattern will look like, without using up too much fabric and time. So my first layout was this 32" x 48" baby quilt.

To make this quilt you will need:

(96) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in main fabric
(96) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in background fabric

(24) 5" x 5" squares in main fabric
(24) 5" x 5" squares in background fabric

Make Four-Patch blocks and HSTs by following the instructions above.

You'll end up with 48 Four-Patch blocks and 48 HSTs

Arrange the blocks as shown in the picture below to make the original Confetti Quilt layout.

Choosing fabrics for the Confetti Quilt

This is a scrappy quilt meant to use up whatever you have on hand, but you can make it as scrappy or as coordinated as you like. Most of my scrappy quilts are "coordinated scrappy", where I will pick a colour, or colour family, and just use different fabrics in that colour. Good examples of that are my Scrappy Love samples (rainbow and blue), and the Tumbled Love table runner.

If you want to do the same, just pick any colour combination you like. I'm partial to combinations that use bright colours on darker backgrounds, like pink or orange on blue, or yellow on charcoal.  I also like just about any colour on a neutral, low-volume background.

For this quilt, I wanted to try a full-on scrappy mix of everything in my bin of precut squares, so I went with "everything" for the main fabrics and low-volume neutrals for the background.

Making the Mini Quilts

I ended up turning the baby quilt (it wasn't sewn together yet, only laid out on my design wall) into three smaller quilts that a local guild would be able to use to make newborn quilts for the maternity ward at our hospital. These baby quilts need to be 24" x 24", which worked out to a 6 x 6 layout of these blocks.

The baby quilt layout didn't provide quite enough blocks to make all three mini quilts, so I had to add a few more blocks to be able to finish them. For the layouts below, though, I've added the exact number of blocks for each layout, so you can just make the number of blocks needed for each mini quilt.

**you might wonder why none of the quilts pictured in this tutorial are finished. That's because the finished tops were given to the local guild for quilting and finishing, and distribution, so I didn't have a chance to photograph them once they were all done.

Layout No 1

For this first layout, you will need 20 HSTs and 16 Four-Patch blocks, which means:

(32) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in main fabric
(32) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in background fabric

(10) 5" x 5" squares in main fabric
(10) 5" x 5" squares in background fabric

Layout No 2

This second layout is the opposite of the first one, so you'll need 16 HSTs and 20 Four-Patch blocks.

The fabrics required are:

(40) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in main fabric
(40) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in background fabric

(8) 5" x 5" squares in main fabric
(8) 5" x 5" squares in background fabric

Layout No 3

And this last layout uses the same number of blocks as the first one, but they're arranged differently. This means you'll need 20 HSTs and 16 Four-Patch blocks, made from:

(32) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in main fabric
(32) 2.5" x 2.5" squares in background fabric

(10) 5" x 5" squares in main fabric
(10) 5" x 5" squares in background fabric

Make it bigger

I love this Confetti Quilt because it's very easy to make a larger quilt with it. My original drawing was for a throw size, but you can simply add more blocks to make the quilt as big as you like. All you need is (4) 2.5" squares for each Four-Patch block you want to add, and (2) 5" squares will give you two HSTs.

This mockup shows a small throw size at 48" x 64".

And this one is for a Twin size at 64" x 80".

Additional quilt and block sizes are included in the printable tutorial in the pattern shop.

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