Confetti Quilt - the pastel FIGO Basics one

A new version of my Confetti quilt is hanging in the FIGO booth at QuiltCon! 

Earlier this year I was asked if I would be interested in making a quilt with their new basics lines, so of course I said yes.

Confetti quilt

The Confetti quilt is a tutorial for a super fun, super scrappy quilt. It's the perfect scrap basket cleaner.

It's also available as a Printable Tutorial, which means you can print it out and keep it by your sewing machine. No scrolling through a blog post with your foot on the machine pedal :-)

The Confetti quilt is made up of HSTs and 4-patch blocks, always with a background fabric and a main one. For both of my versions I have used white-ish fabrics for the background, and multiple colours for the main to get that fun, confetti look, but there are other options as well.  

Coordinated scrappy - or anything goes

Depending on your preferences and style, you can make this quilt in a mix of all the colours and use it to clean out the scrap baskets. Or you can coordinate the fabrics you want to use for the main colours.

For a multi-colour main fabric line up, a single colour background works best to highlight the design. But if you want to go really really scrappy, try separating your fabrics into darks and lights and making the quilt that way. Don't forget to take a black & white photo to make sure there are no mid-value fabrics in there, and all your lights and darks contrast nicely.

FIGO Basics for the Confetti quilt

I used these prints for my pastel Confetti quilt, and had a 1/4 yard of each one to play with. They're a mix of a bunch of FIGO's new basics collections, such as Dewfall, Dovetail, Nest, Seasons, and Stash.

Using pastels is not my usual wheelhouse but I really enjoyed working with them and seeing this quilt come together.

All the white-on-white and very low volume greys became background, and the colourful prints became the main fabrics. There weren't quite equal numbers of lights and colours, so I made sure to mix them up well to distribute everything evenly.

Piecing the FIGO Confetti quilt

Making this from yardage meant I could piece it a little quicker than I would if I was using just scraps. Although I precut my scraps, so I just have to find the right size precuts in my bins and get started, and don't have to worry about ironing and cutting scraps first. 

I use 2-at-a-time HSTs here for the Confetti quilt just because that makes the most sense for scraps, but technically with yardage, I could have also used the 4-at-a-time or even 8-at-a-time methods.

I also "cheated" a little bit for the 4-patch blocks, since I had yardage to play with, so I strip-pieced those as much as I could instead of cutting small squares first. This works well if you have strips in your scrap bins, too. Even if they're not very long, match them up with each other and strip-piece as many as you can before using squares.

Rainbow binding and backing

When I got the palette to look through and decide which fabrics to use for what, I immediately jumped to the rainbow stripe for the binding. Striped binding is such a fun addition to a quilt, and the rainbow stripe just pulled the whole quilt together. 

I had left the backing up to the team at FIGO, and they ended up sending me even more rainbow stripe goodness for that. There is a seam on the back for the throw size quilt, so I made sure to match up all the rainbow stripes before sewing the two pieces together.

And don't these fabrics look delicious?

Quilting design for the Confetti quilt

This quilt was longarmed by Heather of Red Willow Quilts, and we went back and forth over a few pantograph ideas before settling on this Simple Stained Glass pantograph.

I love how it echoes the shapes created by the piecing, but still stands out a little and adds an extra layer to the design.