How to Make a Bubble Quilt | a Shabby Fabrics Tutorial

[Music] hi it's jen from shabby fabrics today i'm going to show you how to make a bubble quilt i made these for my kids when they were little and that was a long time ago and now they're back in fashion people are talking about this again and so i want to show you how fun and easy it is to make of course there's a free download be sure to grab that so you can make one of these at home if you love the fabric we've done that in it's called sophie it's by brenda riddle for moda fabrics i love this collection it's very soft and pretty and obviously just beautiful for a little baby girl just to have the babies kind of lay on there when they're playing with their kind of bouncy toys and things like that it's really how i used my bubble quilts for my kids so again limited kits available of sophie or just download this and you can use your own fabrics and just substitute for whatever works best for your family's decor okay how does this bubble thing work well it's really pretty cool you'll have two fabrics that make up each one of the kind of biscuits or squares of the bubble quilt and this is what they're going to look like and why they have the pleat is because the fabric that's in the back is a different size a half inch smaller than the fabric on top four and a half inches here five inches here by the way charm squares as we know are five inch squares so if you've got some squares of some charms laying around or even a layer cake that's 10 inch squares you could cut those in half both directions and have five inch squares and have a very scrappy look and get yourself you know ready to go and making a bubble quilt in just no time by using pre-cuts the fabric that's on the back is not seen this quilt has a separate backing on it this is not going to be that backing this is just the backing of the biscuit again the quilt will have its own backing separate and different so this is where you could be using a solid cotton or a muslin just doesn't need to be a very doesn't need to be an expensive fabric back there two fabrics again four and a half by five i always love to use a fresh rotary blade and of course grab those refill blades which i sometimes i'm sure on at home when i'm sewing our instructions will have you lining up the fabrics and i'll put these side by side so we can see the project at the same time here right here on the upper right corner you'll line up your squares i'll explain how we're going to get the tuck and then i'll go demonstrate that on the sewing machine so we'll line up here you'll start sewing if your machine has a needle down feature it's a great option to engage that way when you do stop that needle is kind of holding everything together while you bring this end up to meet the white square which will create this little bit of a tuck and then we will sew right over that we'll come right almost to the corner stopping a quarter inch away we'll pivot and then turn repeat that process on all three sides and leave the fourth side open on that fourth side we'll just sew straight off so that's what your little biscuit is going to look like and you'll make all of them the same so let's go ahead head over to the machine i'll be using a tool called the purple thing you might have seen me use this before to help hold my pleats so we'll just start with our standard quarter inch seam allowance and i'll go ahead and stop this is when i'll bring that end up to meet the white square and i just push that pleat forward and i'm just looking for about the middle i'll turn that so you can see that about the middle don't worry if it's not exactly in the middle it really doesn't matter i'm just going to use the purple thing to hold that in position it keeps my fingers away and now i'll turn once again stop bring that end up push our pleat to about the middle position maybe a little bit more let's put that there try to keep my fingers out of the way and again if you can't see you can always pivot and say yeah that's about that's about the middle and then make adjustments if you need to and then just sew straight off so you will complete all of your squares and prepare them all that way now when i first learned how to make bubble quilts what i was taught at the time was just go ahead grab some polyfill and you want of course have it be the same amount each time so you can kind of experiment it kind of fills the palm of my hand and i filled the squares and i did this with all of them they were all over my table all over my kitchen table i remember that very vividly and you push it all the way to the side and you take all of them back to the sewing machine come here make your pleat and close them then you do the layout that's how i learned but what we discovered was it's a lot easier to sew the squares together when there's no polyfill there's no kind of mound there so i'm giving you an option today and that's the way that we wrote the pattern doing it the first way that i learned will absolutely work out it's a little bit more work because you can imagine with these each filled and trying to squeeze them together it's a little bit more difficult so let me focus on this new approach that might save you some struggle and i think probably save you some time once you have all of your squares sewn together with the three sides with their tucks and the fourth side open our instructions will give you an arrangement for a layout especially if you're going to be doing the sofi quilt or maybe your own fabrics and you like that arrangement or of course if you just want a completely scrappy look you can do any arrangement that you'd like however you choose to lay them out we will be assembling them in columns columns one all the way through nine as shown here on our download so you'll always have your opening to the right side so we'll be starting off with our green square here and our white square is next and those openings will be to the right and we would continue with all of our squares and i've done some of those ahead of time and i've also put the polyfill in but i'll move on to that in just a minute the point being that you're going to lay everything out once you're satisfied with your layout i'd recommend that you sew them together in pairs initially and then in groups of four and then join those together versus just adding on and adding on it helps to alleviate kind of bowing that can happen when you just add on to the first one and keep adding on to that chain now when you place these right side together remember that we sewed with a quarter inch seam allowance so that means in order for that thread to be hidden we need to sew just a little bit more than that quarter inch seam allowance maybe we can we call it kind of a chunky quarter inch that way when you sew these together and open them back up you're not seeing any thread showing through so when i first made mine quilt i did quarter inch seams and sewed them together with quarter inch seams and a couple times i went shallow on the quarter and when i opened them up i could see some of my threads showing through and it was very obvious on my dark fabrics so that's why i'd encourage you that when we start sewing i'm going to be sewing just to the left of my thread that way i know i won't have any of that showing through so let me go ahead and pin that and we'll go sew just a little bit greater than our quarter inch seam i'll be on the left side of my quarter inch seam let's go do that real quick okay as i mentioned i had gone ahead and also um i'm going to take this one out real quick while i sew this together or repeat that and then i'm going to show you you know it's again just filling up those puffs so to speak or squares and i want to show you some just how it's a little bit awkward really to kind of sew them together when that puff is in there that's why i just took the puff out of this one so let me just go ahead i can get that sewn real quick it's the same thing i've just done so i'll do that real quick off camera and then i'll come back stuff those and we're going to go to the machine and we'll close those just in succession one after the other so i've sewn my column together of course you'll have more squares in your column and now we'll grab our polyfill so try to get the same amount each time you know kind of that handful palm full i should say you want enough that you've got poof but not so much that you can't get these little biscuits closed now push it in all the way left that'll help when we get ready to close it and now we're not sewing over the polyfill and we have just a it's a lot easier to access the pleat so we'll go ahead and we're going to do the same process where we're going to make this pleat now one thing i want to mention if you want to have interlocking seams between your columns what we how we wrote our pattern is for columns 1 3 5 7 9 all basically all of our odd rows that seam will be going downwards so as we come to close our little biscuit we're just kind of making sure that that is downward that's natural on our columns that are our odd numbers when we go to do our even rows where our seams are going up and i've done that one ahead of time that's where we will want to make sure we almost kind of deliberately as we close that side maybe even put a pin in there so i'm just going to show you this because it's the same process for every column but i want to mention if you are interested in having those nice interlocking seams when you sew the columns together on your even numbered rows and the seams are going up you might want to pin those so that when your presser foot comes it doesn't roll those seams back that won't happen here because this is in the same direction that we're traveling so let's go to the machine and we'll go ahead and close the right side of each of our squares and get our column ready to go i think i'll use my tool again purple thing so you can see with just a little it's a little bit more difficult but with the poof over here it's definitely helpful now this is where that seam this is my first row and all of our odd number rows our seam will be going down if you were on your row 2 4 6 8 you'd want to have that seam going up so just wanted to mention that you can either just keep an eye on it pin it or kind of hold that down with the purple thing but in this case we want that seam to be going down i'll show you one more and then i'll just go sew the rest of those together so i have my column the right side is now closed and you'll complete that process for all of your columns so i'll take my next column two and now you're just sewing those columns together so we know we pushed our polyfill uh to this direction and of course you would have done the same thing here now we want to kind of push it back to the other side sometimes even shaking them a little bit but mostly just kind of shifting it to kind of go over there now kind of move it back and forth and that's why you don't want to sew on it you want it to be able to be mobile and able to move as you need it to so now right side together this is where those interlocking seams are really helpful i'm going to use a combination of my wonder clips because now i'm dealing with bulk whenever i'm doing um whenever i'm doing quilting i'm really using those fine clover patchwork pens you saw me doing that but when i start dealing with bulk i either go to the clover flower head pin and or a combination of wonder clips sometimes the mini clips sometimes the full size these are full size now if you're going to go ahead and try to keep that poly fill out of the way and you decide to use your flower head pins i recommend you have the head of the pin going away from the direction you're traveling so that as you're coming down here you're not poking yourself very easy to do so i will just continue let's say this is my row two so those seams are going to go up those seams are going to go down and you see how those nest i want you to see that it's a great option hey if you have a rolled seam you can either seam rip it or just go with it not a huge deal the quilt is already going to be bulky so don't worry that be up to you whether you want to that's right we're going to go down with our flower head pin aren't we we don't want to poke ourselves boy these flower head pins are sharp so i'm going to continue clipping and pinning when we come back to the machine i've changed out my presser foot now i think i've got a 1d in there it's a wider foot i really want the wider foot now we know we're sewing greater than the quarter inch seam allowance and i've already got my stitch line as my visual guide and i'm just going to be sewing to the left of that but that wider foot helps kind of plow through this bulk and kind of keep my polyfill off to my left so i'll go ahead again clip and pin and i want to go to the machine and have you see me sew that together and just see how we kind of manage the bulk of the project so see over at the machine in just a moment so you can see with me not pressing it down this thing is it's bulky so i use my hand to flatten that out go ahead and back stitch here and now i'm just looking to the left [Music] [Music] so you'll continue sewing columns together in pairs just like before we recommend you know you don't just add on and add on do your pairs and then sew those together into fours and then sew it all together now depending on how much polyfill you used you'll have to measure your quilt to see what size it is you'll cut your backing fabric to that exact measurement you'll go ahead and lay your quilt top right side up with your backing fabric wrong side up go ahead and start on a side of the quilt never begin in the corner you're going to want to sew that with a again a good healthy kind of chunky quarter inch seam allowance again all the way around leaving at least a 12 inch opening so you have a lot of bulk to pull through there before you turn it right side out go ahead and clip the bulk in those corners turn it right side out there's your beautiful quilt you're looking at and then you'll of course turn that opening down as you would anything yet you turn through again with the backing fabric clip that and then we went ahead and used a 1 8 inch stitch all the way around to not only close that opening it just gave it a nice finished look so now you have your quilt together so you could either you're done or if you want to be able to be securing the front to the back the way that bubble quilts were made when i first learned them is we hand tied them you could use a yarn you could use a heavier weight quilting thread some people tie them in every corner some people do them every other corner like so every group of four they would put a tie there some people have even done this on their sewing machine or they do something here in the corner or i've even seen people spread this kind of spread the rose apart and do a beautiful decorative stitch lots of options there to be able to secure the front to the back of the quilt so we would love to see what you do with finishing your quilt up and what options that you take for finishing your front to the back so i know i had a lot of fun those two decades ago now making a bubble quilt and i had fun again making it and even using these new techniques so thank you for sharing part of your day with me hey if you haven't already subscribed to our channel be sure to do that now and share the good news of our free tutorials 24 7 with all of your quilting friends we look forward to seeing you soon on a future shabby video [Music]

Channel: Shabby Fabrics

Views: 117,939

Keywords: quilting tutorial, sewing tutorial, shabby fabrics, bubble quilt, how to sew, how to quilt, sewing, quilting, sophie, sophie fabric, moda, moda fabric, purple thang, clover, notions, clover notions

Id: lVB4iiIB1MA

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021