Prickly Pear Staccato Baby Quilt

Today I'm sharing this Staccato baby quilt I made with Figo's Prickly Pear fabrics. The Staccato quilt pattern is the third pattern in the Bar Quilts series and is a quick and fun make.

Staccato is an easy geometric quilt pattern with a modern, pared-down vibe. It can go super sleek with a monochrome colour palette, or be whimsical and fun with a bright collection of fabrics like the ones in the Prickly Pear collection I used here.

The Staccato quilt pattern is available in the PSQ pattern shop.

Prickly Pear Fabric

Prickly Pear is the newest fabric collection designed by Emily Taylor for Figo Fabrics, and is inspired by the creatures and plant life of the desert. There are cute owls peeking at you from between cacti, desert animals scurrying about the main print, and the two large-scale floral prints are just gorgeous.

I had some smaller pieces left over from another project so I decided to use them in this Staccato baby quilt because I knew it would show off the prints without needing a lot of them.

I used a grey dot print from Figo's Serenity collection because I wanted to make this a fun quilt, so I knew I needed to use a printed background.

Bar Quilts series

This is the third pattern in the Bar Quilts series of modern, geometric stripe quilts. All the patterns use only small amounts of feature fabric and a lot of background, to really let your chosen fabrics shine.

All the Bar Quilts are quick and easy to piece, and suitable for beginners as well as more advanced quilters. The patterns are easy to customize from sleek and minimalist to fun, bright and colourful, and anything in between.

Use up the leftovers

I don't know about you, but in our house, once a week is always leftovers night. Aside from not letting food go to waste, I like getting a second taste of a favourite meal, and sometimes some fun combinations come about because not all the components of a previous meal are still in the fridge.

I feel the same with leftover fabrics. Often there is not quite enough to make another big quilt, but you don't want to use certain fabrics in a scrap quilt either because they you want to show them off and not have them get lost among other scraps. And sometimes some new combinations happen that you wonder why you never thought of them before.

The Bar Quilts series patterns are perfect for those leftovers. The stripes and squares let you show off your favourite prints without needing a lot of any one of them.

Fast and easy quilt pattern

The Staccato quilt pattern is a fast and easy quilt to make. It's a big block quilt, which means it all gets pieced almost in one go, with no blocks to assemble first aside from the strips of squares.

There is a small amount of strip-piecing to make the squares, and this pattern is a perfect first foray into the technique if you're newer to quilting. Staccato is suitable for slightly more advanced beginners and is perfect if you want to start climbing up a rung on the ladder from beginner quilts.

Quilt sizes and options

The Staccato quilt pattern comes with instructions for three sizes, and two colour options.

Sizes included are:

• Pillow or wallhanging
• Baby 
• Throw

I've also included instructions to make this in a multi-coloured version and a two-tone.

Wavy stitch quilting

I used my favourite wavy stitch to quilt this Staccato baby quilt on my domestic machine (I have a Bernina Aurora 440 QE).

The wavy stitch is done with a walking foot, and is also sometimes known as a serpentine stitch. The machine does the wavy line for you by stitching a couple of stitches to the right, then a few to the left, going back and forth in a gentle wave.

It's as simple as doing straight lines, but adds a lot more fun and movement to the quilt. It's almost a bit of a lazy way of doing a stipple. And quilts crinkle up deliciously after washing.

Staccato quilt backing and binding

I purposely kept the size of the Staccato baby quilt under a full width of fabric so you can use just a single length of any 44" wide fabric without having to piece the quilt back.

I used this mustard plus print from Wander by Joel Dewberry that I'd had in my stash forever. I had just enough to back a baby quilt, and the colour coordinates almost perfectly with the fabrics on the front.

For the binding, I wanted to add another little element of fun, so I decided to use a few more of my Prickly Pear scraps to make scrappy binding.

Staccato quilt pattern

This pattern reminds me of the rapid-fire sounds of a staccato piece in music, which is why I chose that name. I used to play in a concert band many years ago, and this quilt brings back memories of some of the pieces we played.

So far I've done a calm blue ombre version, a bright pink, yellow and blue version, and this fun and whimsical one. But every time I go through my stash and my scrap bins, I find another fabric combination I want to use. 

It's a very addicting pattern :-)

And it even looks good sideways :-)

The Staccato pattern is available in the PSQ pattern shop.

Quilt materials used:

Pattern: Staccato by Penny Spool Quilts
Fabric for the top and binding: Prickly Pear and Serenity, both by Figo Fabrics
Backing: Wander by Joel Dewberry for Free Spirit Fabrics