Scrappy Quilts You Can Make In A Day

Got a free afternoon and a bunch of scraps that need a good use? Grab your scrap bins and rotary cutter and let's make some fun scrappy quilts!

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I recently made a bunch of small scrappy quilts that I wanted to share with you. They are all charity quilts, so if you have an overflow of scraps, maybe consider doing something similar and help out an organization bringing joy to people through quilts.

Use up those scraps!

I make a point to use my precut scraps whenever I get a chance, but even so they don't seem to get any less.

So I decided it was time to start a quilt I had been wanting to make for a long time, but have always put off for that elusive day when I'll have a whole day to myself to just sew. Well, it was time to get started on it, whether I had that magical alone time or not. I doodled this pattern on a piece of note paper a few years ago, and have kept it in my bin of precut squares, for said magical day.

The scrappiest quilt ever

I'm pretty sure this is the scrappiest quilt I have ever made. I usually go for more of a controlled scrappy look, but with this pattern I decided I was just going to blindly stitch things together and see where it would lead me. And I have to say, I love how it turned out. It reminded me of Carnival back home because it looks so much like an explosion of confetti. This quilt uses just two blocks, a 4.5" HST and a 4-patch made of 2.5" square, each of them made with bright fabrics for the pattern and low volumes to act as background.

See this tutorial to make your own Confetti quilts.

This confetti quilt is a baby size at 32" x 48". I usually make roughly this size to test a pattern idea or colour combination, but I have so many baby quilts sitting around my studio now that I wanted to make something that would have a purpose. I don't have any friends or family members who are having babies at the moment, so I decided to take this one apart and instead make mini quilts for our local hospital's maternity unit. Luckily, I had only laid out the quilt on the design wall and not stitched the blocks together yet.

My neighbour had been telling me about the mini baby quilts her guild makes for the hospital. They're 24" square quilts and every baby born there is given one to take home. I thought that was a perfect use for my scraps, so I set about turning the large baby quilt into three mini quilts for the hospital. 

Confetti Quilts

I played around with the placement of the two blocks and rotated them around to see what I could come up with. I wanted to make three different mini quilts, so I switched blocks back and forth to see how they turn out, and ended up with these three fun layouts.

It's so fun to see what happens when you start with the blocks and then make the layout later. I usually start with an idea of what I want the overall quilt to look like, so doing things "backwards", so to speak, was a nice change.

These are all just quilt tops because they're being quilted and finished by someone else before being given to the hospital.

Check out this tutorial to make your own Confetti quilts.

Fun with Scraps by Katherine Curtsinger

I also had the pleasure of testing some patterns from Katherine Curtsinger's new book, Fun with Scraps, and decided that hospital baby quilts were perfect for that, too.

Fun with Scraps is written specifically for use with scraps and includes a good section at the beginning with tips for working with scraps, keeping them organized etc. as well. Most of the 16 quilt patterns featured are block based and have sizing for baby up to bed size, but as you can see, you can easily adapt the patterns to suit whatever size quilt you need. The book also includes a sampler that uses blocks from each of the patterns, a seven other suggested quilt projects that use blocks from the book.

Since I needed a very specific size for these hospital quilts, I picked two patterns that were easily adapted to that requirements. My choices were the Drop Zone X pattern for one of the quilts, and All My Hearts for the other one.

Drop Zone X makes a slightly smaller block than what I required, so I added a big border around the whole quilt. All the blue fabrics are from my precut bins, and I had enough yellow fabrics in my bin of large scraps that I was able to make this scrappy border from just scraps as well. If you're curious about how I organize my stash and scraps, pop over to this blog post.

All My Hearts is made of many small blocks, so it was easy to just make as many blocks as I needed for my quilt. I picked a rainbow of 2.5" squares for the hearts, because I knew I wanted to make this quilt as unisex as possible. I was briefly considering using a proper rainbow arrangement for the hearts, but then decided to go by the background fabric instead and arrange the hearts randomly.

Fun with Scraps is available on Amazon as well as a few other online booksellers'. I've linked to Amazon.com for convenience (or click here if you're in Canada), but I would encourage you to check with your local quilt shop to see if they carry the book or would be able to order it in for you.