Garden Beds Quilt Pattern

The Garden Beds Quilt Pattern is available today! Pop on over to my Etsy shop to have a look!

Garden Beds got its name because of these fun floral fabrics that I used in the first version that I made, and because the square in a square with sashing reminded me of raised garden boxes with a walkway or path in between.

While I don’t adore bees in real life (I know, I know, they’ve got an important job to do!  I just happen to have a mild allergy, so I don’t enjoy seeing them.) I think the soft blue bees on the cream sashing fabric are just darling!  They’re in the quilt in green and pink too!

I’m not sure why this quilt didn’t meet Scout the Quilt Inspector’s approval, but I can assure you this pattern has been tested and meets the strictest of quality control standards, maybe Scout is just extra picky.  Or maybe she wanted more treats.  Whatever, bad cat photo, good quilt.

And, she left the quilt all wrinkly when she was done inspecting!

The idea for this pattern came about while I was working on the Scrappy Frames Quilt Tutorial.  I needed a photo to show what the squares and off-set squares looked like when putting the rows together, and created this graphic.  While the patterns are different, I knew right away that I needed to make a pattern like this.

I wrote Garden Beds to have two sashing options.  The pink and green version has a single fabric (those little blue bees) for all of the sashing.  This blue, green and yellow version has a scrappy sashing made up of lots of different gray fabrics.

While you can sort of see those scrappy grays in the above photo, here is another that shows a few of them more clearly.

The throw size Garden Beds quilt measures 52” by 64” and is one of the quilts that got to travel to Montana with me!  This is Garden Beds at Saint Mary Lake in Glacier National Park.

The blue and green is the baby size quilt is approximately 42” by 52”.  While it looks yellow in these photos, it’s actually more of a greeny-yellow that I used, and several of the fabrics are named Pickle. 

I wish I had had more of the navy dot for binding, I typically like darker bindings, but I do really like this pickle binding too.

Garden Beds also comes in Twin, Queen and King sizes; these are the fabric requirements for all five sizes.  As you can see, fabric requirements are given for both single or scrappy sashing for all sizes.  You only need to pick on or the other of the sashing options, not both.

During our Montana trip we also used and photographed Garden Beds while hanging out at Flathead Lake.

Zoomed in: more quilt, less scenery

Zoomed out: a smaller quilt image and more of the lake in the background.

And, as with all quilt photo shoots: outtakes!

With both the single sashing and the scrappy sashing versions of Garden Beds, I used the sashing to determine how/where I quilted the layers together.

For the larger quilt, I drew a dot in the center of all horizontal and vertical sashing intersections.  Then, I drew a line from dot to dot.  I used heat-soluble pens to do this.

Then, I quilted ¼” to the left and right of each line, and ended up with a fun lattice that did a great job of working with the pattern rather than taking away from the pattern of the quilt top.

For the smaller quilt I also used the sashing to set up my quilting, but in a different way.  This time I quilted ¼” to the left and right of all sashing.  This was easy for the horizontal sashing, and required drawing lines (again using heat-soluble pens) for parts of the vertical sashing.  I used the corners of the sashing squares (they’ve got white dots to make them stand out in the photo) and drew lines to connect them to the next square.

I really like how this quilting looks on the backing!

One more time, here is the link to the Garden Beds Quilt Pattern – in my Etsy Shop.

And, I’m going to let you in on a little secret- the pink and green Garden Beds isn’t really a quilt!  At least, not a quilt you would use indoors.  Check back in a couple of weeks when I share what I did with this quilt top to make something out of the ordinary, but very, very useful!