I love playing around digitally with variations of existing quilt patterns, to see the different looks I can create, or maybe there is a new secondary pattern that comes through with a certain colourway.

This time around, I was playing around with my Confetti quilt pattern. I had just made the pastel Confetti quilt for the FIGO booth at QuiltCon, so it was still going around in my head.

Confetti Quilt Pattern

The Confetti Quilt is not actually a full pattern, but a printable tutorial, meaning it has instructions for making the blocks and how to put them together, and tells you how many and what sizes you need to make certain quilt sizes, but it doesn't give you full yardage requirements and such.

It's also meant for scraps, which is another reason it doesn't have yardage, but you can definitely use yardage to make it and just mix and match everything to make it look scrappy. That's what I did with the FIGO version, I had fat quarters to use there.

The original, colourful one was all scraps, though.

Confetti Inside Out

The Confetti pattern is based on HSTs and 4-patch units, and they're put together to form colourful diamonds and irish chains. 

For this "Inside Out" version, I turned all the blocks 180 degrees, so they would create the opposite design with the diamonds and irish chains being formed by the background fabric, and what used to be background was now colourful.

And here's a version with a dark background, since I tend to default to white for that but it doesn't always need to be white. In fact, some colours pop even more on a dark background. 

As I was turning blocks around, I noticed that a fun design as well that happened if I only turned the HSTs, but left the 4-patch blocks as they were in the original. It got a more "spiky" appearance, with the white parts standing out more as diamonds and little "sticks".

And it's even more pronounced with the dark background, especially the "sticks" or rectangles of the dark fabric.

Ombre Confetti

I always love a good ombre colourway, whether that's scrappy or fresh fabric, so of course I had to try out an ombre colouring for the Confetti quilt as well. And I love it! I'm very tempted to start up making another one of these with all my blue scraps (I have a lot of those).

Gradient Confetti 

It's only a small step to go from a single-colour ombre to a multi-colour gradient. In this case, I decided to go just from one colour to a different one, without any in-betweens. The key to making a gradient like this is to draw a mental line where you want to the two colours to meet, and then scatter some of each colour on the opposite side, so it looks like they're flowing together. 

What do you think of these variations, would you try them?