Friday Finish: Polka Dot Square

This was a quick bow tie quilt that is earmarked for my friend's soon-to-arrive baby. Baby quilts are fun! Because they're small, they come together quickly, which is satisfying for sewists like myself who have short attention spans.

I got this as a kit  from Craftsy. The fabric and pattern are all from Riley Blake, and I thought the dots were fun and modern looking. It only took me a few hours to cut out and piece together. Craftsy seems very generous in their fabric allowances, and I had enough leftover to make extra blocks to use for a strip of backing, which I think is a fun surprise.

The bow tie quilt is a pretty traditional pattern, and usually the square in the middle (or the knot part of the bow) is made by sewing a triangle on the two corners of the block. This pattern, by a Riley Blake designer, called for raw-edge appliquéing the squares onto the quilt. Since I figured baby quilts might get washed fairly often, I didn't like the idea of raw edge appliqué, so I did my trusty interface appliqué instead, and that seemed to work just fine. I think if I would make this pattern again, I would just do the traditional block construction with the triangles.

I quilted it in an all over free-form spiral, which I call my Triple Goddess spiral, because it looks like the Celtic symbol (sometimes, not always...because I'm not fussy about stuff like that!).

The pattern is called Polka Dot Square, and it's available  as a free download from the Riley Blake website.