The Darling Dogwood: All Puffed Up Blog Hop coming soon

Island Batik's first blog hop of the year starts on Monday. Each ambassador was sent one of the newest Island Batik collections and tasked with making a puff quilt. Also called biscuit quilts, a puff quilt is what it sounds like--a quilt stuffed with fiber fill to make little puffs.

My assigned collection is Bits & Pieces, a signature collection for Sherry Shish of Powered by Quilting, designed by Island Batik's head designer Kathy Engle. Bits & Pieces has such beautiful bright colors! It's a really fun collection. And I'm on the first day of the hop! Come back on Monday to see my puff quilt made with the bright fabrics. (Full hop schedule below)

I had never made a puff quilt before, so I had to look up how to do it. There are a lot of tutorials out there and a lot of different methods. I am usually far too impatient to do a test block, but this time it felt important to test out the technique. I ended up doing THREE small tests! I used Island Batik scraps and stash builder strips (5" x WOF), so I can show you my samples now. See how much Buttercup the cat loves them all?

First, there was a recent blog post by Laura at Slice of Pi Quilts about doing a puff quilt on her longarm. I don't have a longarm but I thought I could try it on my domestic machine. Well, I liked the technique, but because I was doing it on a standard machine instead of a long arm, I had to turn the quilt a lot and there was no way to eliminate having the already stuffed puffs in the small throat of my machine. I managed to finish my 5 x 5 sample, but the last two rows were tricky and I wouldn't want to do it with anything bigger. She bound hers like a standard quilt and I had every intention of doing that to mine as well, but before I could, my son claimed this sample for the cat and put it on her cat tree. I figured that Buttercup probably doesn't care about raw edges and left it unbound.

Since I knew that technique wouldn't work for me, I moved on to one of the youtube tutorials I watched, that like Laura's method, uses a completed quilt top. I went back and watched it again, and then made 2 simultaneous test. One exactly as done in her tutorial, and another without the tucks. I figured if I liked the look of my first test and there were no tucks, I'd see if they were really necessary. Here is the test without tucks:

And here is the one with tucks, exactly as in the tutorial. I do like the look of the test with the tucks a little better. Not a whole lot better, but better. One of these also went to the cat, and the third is now a stuffed animal quilt.

So now that you've seen my test samples, come back on February 6th to see my finished puff quilt made with the Bits and Pieces collection! And be sure to follow along all month for all the puffy goodness of the All Puffed Up blog hop! Here is the complete schedule:

February 6