Scrappy Love quilt - the baby one

I finally finished this baby sized Scrappy Love quilt. I made it back when Scrappy Love released, but then put the top aside and hadn't quilted it.

I was sorting through my batting and backing scraps recently - actually because my cat had chased a mouse into the bottom of my cubby hole shelving unit, where those are stored, and I wanted to make sure that's not where the mouse had actually been living (yikes!). I started to sort out what I could use together to finish up some of my WIPs, and then found this quilt top and fell in love again. Plus, it was coming up on Valentine's Day, and what better to work on than a heart quilt? 

Scrappy Love quilt pattern

Scrappy Love is a beginner-friendly pattern that's quick and fun to put together. It's a perfect scrap buster, but there are also instructions for using yardage, in case you want to use a favourite fabric collection, or use up some of your stash.

You can even make the background scrappy, like I did in my blue ombre version or the rainbow version. 

The pattern is block-based, which means you can easily size the quilt up or down by adding more blocks, or making fewer, although the pattern already comes with 5 sizes ranging from Baby to Double.

Figo Fabrics

For this Scrappy Love baby quilt, I used scraps from the two Figo Fabrics lines Kingyo, and Prickly Pear.

They were left over from two magazine quilts, Snowball Lace used Kingyo, and Line Dance used the Prickly Pear collection. Figo had sent me the fabric for those two quilts, and they were very generous. I love both lines so I had been hoarding those scraps for a special project :-)

One of my pattern testers had made a two-colour version of Scrappy Love and I really liked how that looked. I already had a rainbow one, and an ombre, so I thought something with just two colours could be fun to try. And when I looked through my scraps, I realized that the pinks and blues in the Kingyo and Prickly Pear worked together perfectly, and I had just about enough left to make enough hearts for a baby sized quilt.

Scrappy Love can be made with a scrappy background, or yardage. I did the scrappy background for my other two samples, so for this one I decided to use one of the prints from Figo's basics line, Serenity. I had used the same one for Line Dance and love the simplicity of it.

Wavy Quilting

I love the texture of wavy line quilting, so I decided to default to that. It makes the quilt look extra crinkly and cozy, and it's easy to do. I love that it's straight line quilting with the walking foot, but if the lines are not 100% straight, you can't tell because they're wavy.

Plus I was using some lovely Robert Kaufman Mammoth Junior flannel for the back, so this just added to the overall coziness of the quilt.

Wavy line quilting is actually a setting on the sewing machine, sometimes called a serpentine stitch. On my Bernina 475 it's called "running stitch", and you can set the width and length to make the wave look closer to a zigzag, more like a gentle back-and-forth curve, or a nice wide wave. I set my machine to 2.5 stitch length, and 5mm stitch width, which is the maximum on this machine, to achieve this look. 

Flanged Binding

When it came time to binding this quilt, I couldn't decide what colour to go for. Should it be pink or blue? Or something altogether? I had picked up some more Kingyo yardage on sale at a local store recently, so I did have some matching fabric for the binding.

In the end, I decided to poll my newsletter and instagram audience and ask their advice. Instead of helping me decide between the colours, though, they gave me a new idea :-) A lot of people suggested scrappy binding using both colours, and the idea of doing a faux flange with the two colours also came up.

I had never done a flanged binding, so I thought a baby quilt is the perfect size to try out something new. And this was perfect because I didn't have to decide between pink and blue, I could just use both.

I was originally going to make the binding pink with a blue flange, but the blue fabric had these cute little goldfish on it that I wanted to see, so I ended up reversing it and going with the pink flange instead.

If you've never tried flanged binding, it's much easier than it looks. I wrote a tutorial here for you to follow, and there's a video on my Youtube channel as well.