A Scrappy Rainbow Fiona Quilt

I am so excited to share this scrappy, rainbow version of the Fiona Quilt Pattern  with you! It checks all of the boxes for me — scrappy, rainbow, displays many favorite prints, and uses sashing fabric that was leftover backing fabric. This quit was a journey in so many ways and so this post might be a little wordier than normal.

When I wrote this pattern, I knew that I wanted to create something that would work for square scraps. My original plan was actually to make this scrap quilt based on value (with a dark value in the center and then gradually working out with lighter value towards the edges) and I would still love to make that quilt, but the scraps that I had on hand just worked better for a rainbow and I will never turn down a rainbow quilt.

There are some precious prints in here, including an Ed Emberly dragon print that I used for my son's quilt years ago and several of my favorite Ruby Star Society print. Getting to work with lots of favorite prints all at once is one of my favorite parts of making scrap quilts.

I decided to use leftover Widescreen backing fabric from a previous project for the sashing (I have done this before here and here, and even wrote a post about it here). Unfortunately I didn't measure the fabric first and ended up just a little bit short. Luckily I was able to find it in stock (which was lucky because I don't think they are making this print anymore!) and bought just enough to finish up the quilt. You can still find this print available in other colorways (check out the gray one here) but the black version was tricky to find and I bought it all!

For the quilting, I did something that was completely new to me. Have you ever seen someone quilt with a serpentine stitch? It's so pretty! But my machine doesn't have a serpentine stitch. I found this post on a message board that has instructions for how to program the stitch into my machine. This seemed intimidating, but was actually not that difficult. You can find the tutorial here. It is written for the Janome MC6600p (which is the machine that I use) but possibly would work for other machines. I followed the instructions except I changed the stitch length to 3.2.

And I love how the quilting turned out! The texture is great and it was very forgiving so I would definitely recommend that you give it a try.

The backing for the quilt is a 108" wide Tula Pink print that I had in my stash. I didn't want to do anything too busy and I like the scale of this print. The binding is a pink solid that I had very unhelpfully left sitting around unlabeled but it's Kona something.  

Whenever I make a quilt like this I start to wonder why I don't switch to only making scrap quilts. But then I remember that I need to make non-scrap quilts to get the scraps in the first place. Plus I do love sewing with fabric collections and mixing things up.

If you would like to make a quilt just like this one, start cutting your scraps! You can pick up your copy of the Fiona Quilt Pattern in my shop.