Here's an easy adorable quilt pattern that is suitable for children's and baby quilts.
This quilt is available for sale! To inquire, send me a contact form here.
The focus fabric of this quilt is this sweet elephant-print fabric. To coordinate with that main elephant-print fabric, I used a combination of a pin-dot and plain fabrics in a bubblegum colour palette. For the back, I used minky dots.
My Fabric Pulls for the Bubbly Checkerboard Quilt
I wanted this quilt to be a throw, so it was never going to be a large quilt. But I also really wanted to use up as much of that elephant-print fabric as possible, so the quilt turned out to be about 155 cm x 155 cm - slightly larger than regular-sized throw.
I did not use batting in this quilt. Instead, I used a layer of mercerized cotton, for two reasons:
To keep it light enough to be used as a throw, seeing that I was already going to use minky dots for the back; and
To keep it easy to quilt with my small-harp space sewing machine.
Here's an illustration to show the design and dimensions of the quilt:
The quilt top consists of the following pieces:
These circular fabric "chips' were prepared using the same starch-and-press method used in my Mini Orange Peel Quilt.
The circular fabric "chips" were appliqued onto the plain squares using machine straight stitches in matching thread, before all the square blocks were pieced together to form the checkerboard arrangement. You could of course hand-applique instead, for that finer finish.
For the quilting, I first machine stitched about 3mm away from the ditches on both sides, with the mercerised cotton but without the minky dot backing. Then, I added the minky dot backing and quilted the horizontal and vertical lines that cross the center of each square. This "two-stage quilting" method serves two purposes:
To minimise the amount of bulky quilting; and
To minimise the amount of quilting on the minky dot backing, so it remains as smooth as possible.
Quilt by the ditch with mercerised cotton only, followed by horizontal and vertical quilt lines crossing the center of each square blocks with the minky dot backing.
An Overall View of the Quilting Lines
Hope this post inspires your own bubbly quilt!