Sonic Bloom – Trees

Another quilt pattern I had the opportunity to test was the Sonic Bloom Quilt by Lazy Cozy Quilts

I’m finally writing this for two reasons, I’m finally catching up with some of the “bigger” (not meaning size!) quilts I made over the summer AND this one is winging its way to its new home! My best friend bought it for one of her friend’s new babies and I couldn’t be happier it’s going to somewhere wonderful. I really love this quilt!

It looks complicated, but it’s really simple once you get into it and since it’s the same shape you can get into a rhythm in making the blocks and it doesn’t really take very long. I wouldn’t say it’s a quick make, but it’s not the most time intensive I made this summer!! Cutting takes a little longer, but Lazy Cozy has some good cutting tips. (Layering up a few bits of fabric and using a new rotary blade really help too!)

I cut my templates out of an IKEA plastic table mat, it’s my new favourite thing for pattern templates. I tried to get more last time I was there though and didn’t see any. (Which is probably a good thing, plastic table mats aren’t really the best environmentally I guess!) You can get some at Target or Walmart in the US, I’ll need to have a little hunt here in the UK before I run out of my IKEA ones.

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I decided to dip into my stash a bit for this one to cut down on some of the fabric costs and pulled out this Dashwood Fabric I bought at a quilt shop in Edinburgh. They were closing down so I got a metre of each at a great price and have been saving them for the right project. I thought the little triangles were ideal for the front and the trees would make a great back! To get the colours for the petals I pulled out bunches of my Kona colour card chips and tried to match the colours in the triangles and trees as best I could. I talked a little about this in my last post here as well. If you like the combinations of colours in a printed fabric, chances are they’ll go well together as solids in a pattern! For this one it worked really well and ended up with a kind of 70s beachy vibe!

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The width of the baby size was perfect to fit into WOF (width of fabric) for my backing trees, but it was too long for the metre I had. So, to add some length I cut some strips from the leftover fabrics for the top and added them into the middle of the backing fabric. This meant I needed to make sure it was lined up straight when basting, and I’ve found out Sewtites are perfect for marking the center points on backing to line up with the top! I’ll do a post on how I baste sometime and show you. I decided to use a simple grid for this one that lined up with the middle of the blocks

I love a scrappy binding, but for this one I decided to piece it purposefully so that the binding would match up with the stripes and it’s probably my favourite thing about this quilt. (Which is saying a lot because I LOVE how this quilt turned out!) I cut 2.5″ strips the same width as I’d cut my stripes and pieced them together. It was necessary to make sure my seam allowance was the same as when I pieced the backing so that they would end up exactly the right width. I usually don’t pin/clip much while I’m adding the binding, but for this one I needed to make sure it all lined up so you can see I used a few in the photo above! This binding was going to be machine sewn to the front which worked out well as I could line the stripes up to the back as I sewed it on. Then I machine sewed it down on the front of the quilt.

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We recently painted our shed blue and it’s been perfect for quilt photos! Hahaha! Can’t make anything too big though or it won’t fit on the shed front!

Thanks for reading along! If you want to keep up with my shop updates and pattern releases sign up to my newseltter here:

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