This quilt came about because of an impromptu day off work I ended up with last week as my son got sick at camp and I had to pick him up and bring him home. He was starting to feel a bit better so he sat at one bit of my desk playing with stamps and drawing, and of course I started to ponder about making something. I had seen a picture of this striped puff quilt, maybe in an email? It is a tutorial available on the Art Gallery Fabrics YouTube channel here, and I thought it looked fun, but then also didn’t think I could be bothered with the stuffing of narrow tubes required.

So that was the inspiration, but then I jumped off from there and kinda ran with it. I had a destash bundle of “1/8″ yard fabrics that I had been wondering what to do with, but when I opened it up to prepare and press the fabric some of the pieces were more like 5” rather than a true 1/8′. I decided to kinda go with it anyway so I trimmed them to square them up, then cut each into two WOF strips. The majority were Art Gallery solids and prints, but the pink was one of unknown manufacturer as it didn’t have a selvedge print.

I was then left with 2 strips each of 11 different fabrics, of differing widths. I sewed them together in sequence to create a striped piece:

This piece was 43 x 56″ once edges were trimmed to square them up, and I wanted it to be a little wider, so I cut it into three pieces 14, 15, and 14″ wide, and cut 7.5″ strips of some white Kona I had leftover from another project, and inserted those in between. I also rejigged the central piece by sewing the short ends together and unpicking one of the original seams so that a different piece was at the top, kinda like how you do a strip pieced trip around the world quilt.

I quilted it with simple lines along the white sashing, then diamonds along the coloured pieces. I thought about adding some hand stitched quilting to accentuate the diamonds, but then chickened out as it looked terrible – I think I need more practice!

The batting, backing and binding all came from from my stash, so that takes quite a few yards away from it! Winner! It came out really fresh and summery so I am pretty happy with it, especially with something that was almost entirely based on winging it. It ended up approximately 56″ square-ish.

My daughter has claimed it as hers already, which I guess I could have predicted!