Sound Waves Baby Quilt, QAL: Week 1

Yay! Today’s the day! My quilt along for “Sound Waves Baby Quilt” starts today! I am SEW glad you’re here! If you haven’t got your pattern yet, you can order it here. You can view the quilt along schedule here. If you’re joining us late, you can still sign up as long as the quilt along is still going. Sign up here.

This week, we’re going to be gathering our fabrics and cutting our pieces. This pattern was originally the bonus pattern for using the leftover units from my Dublin Fancy pattern. I thought it was a fun and easy little quilt to make. So, I decided to tweek it a little so that it could be a stand alone pattern.

I already made another quilt top earlier this month, but I’ll be making another one with you guys during the quilt along. For this one, I chose yellow as the main color with some orange and green to go with it. The off-white strips you see would usually be matching, but for this quilt I decided a subtle scrappy look would be cute. You can see my other two versions of this quilt here and check out what my pattern testers made here.

Choosing fabrics and cutting tips

I’ll be talking about the different pieces of the quilt based on the letters that are designated to each piece in the pattern. You can find the diagram with each piece labeled by letter on page 3 of your pattern.

“A” pieces – these are the little squares that are sewn into columns of 6. These columns were the leftover units that I built this pattern around when I originally wrote it as the bonus pattern for Dublin Fancy. As a stand alone pattern, you can get these squares however you want to get them. They can be very scrappy or only 2 or 3 fabrics repeating. Making your “A” pieces very scrappy will look more like the bonus project from Dublin Fancy. I thought it would be helpful to offer some diagrams for how to cut these 36 “A” pieces from common pre-cuts with some combination ideas. For the one I’m making in this quilt along, I cut these pieces from charms. You can find the diagrams and combination ideas on page 5 of your pattern. These pieces are pretty small, so keep this in mind when you chose the fabric for this. On one hand, large scale prints will be lost in these tiny pieces. On the other hand it’s also a great way to hide those fabrics that have your favorite colors but in ugly prints. The pieces are too small to really notice the ugly prints too much.
“B” and “C” pieces – these are the pieces that go around the columns of 6 little squares. The C pieces will be turned in a different direction from the direction they are cut. So, keep this in mind with directional prints. I decided to keep the pattern this way despite being directionally unfriendly becasue it simplifies the cutting and allows you to use pre-cut strips. You can see me cutting these pieces in this instagram reel. This would not be possible if I changed the cutting instructions to be directional print friendly. You are welcome to cut it differently if you want to, but know that it is not instructed this way in the pattern. If you’re confused about what I mean by directionally unfriendly, check out the little diagram I drew up below. It shows the “B” and “C” with vertical stripes on them so you can see how they look when they are first cut versus after the “C” pieces have been rotated the way they will be in the quilt.

“D” and “E” pieces – these are going to be your biggest pieces and will make up the background. I designed the dimension of these to give you the staggered foreground look.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue to say it… You don’t need a giant cutting mat to be able to cut your pieces. Giant cutting mats are great, but not everybody has a place to put them. You can see me working a small 18″ x 24″ cutting mat to my advantage in the reel I refered to above as well as here, here, and here.

Each Week on the Blog

I’ll link to all of the other weeks near the end of each post. I will add each post here as I have them. You can also find this on the Quilt Alongs Page.

Week 1 – You are currently at the Week 1 post
Week 2 – Assemble your quilt top
Week 3 – Baste and quilt
Week 4 – Bind

Prize for this Week

Our prize for this week is going to be a FREE PDF pattern. The winner can choose any of my patterns accept for the one we are using for this quilt along.

To be eligible for prizes:

– You must be following me @snugglebugstitching on Instagram and post progress pictures for the week on Instagram by Sunday at 5:00 PM Central Time. You must tag me @snugglebugstitching in your posts and use the #soundwavesbabyquiltqal and #soundwavesbabyquilt.

-I will announce the winner on Instagram and tag the lucky quilt alonger so that they know they’ve won. The winner will have one week to contact me to claim the prize. Any unclaimed prizes will be forfeited.