Happy Scrappy Quilt Gallery

Can you believe that it’s been almost a year since we gathered together as a creative community and quilted our way through those first few crazy weeks of a global pandemic?! In March 2020, I hosted a mystery quilt along – the Happy Scrappy QAL – where I encouraged you to dig into your scrap buckets and just play creatively for a little bit each day without stressing about planning the perfect quilt and buying extra supplies.

At a conservative count, there were over 400 quilters who joined in from around the world, uniting together for some quilty therapy to help as deal with the massive change happening in our lives! And today, I’m sharing the wide variety of finished quilts and tops that you folks created from the same pattern. I love seeing so many different versions!

I love the bright royal blue that Deborah used for her background! And by keeping to a tight colour palette of primary colours, it makes for a really cohesive scrap quilt.

In comparison, Stephanie’s palette of orange and pink with pops of lime green makes for quite a spring, citrusy type of quilt! Also, note her fancy corners! Love it.

Anne also stuck to a specific colour palette, choosing teals and earthy mustards for her scraps. I love the way she placed her colours, too!

Dora’s sweet pink, red and teal version has me thinking of peppermints – those red and white swirly ones!

Robyn made a few different versions, but this particularly dark and scrappy plaid version has made me realise that this a great quilt pattern for a memory quilt using men’s shirts.

And Lynette’s scrappy pastel version of has me thinking of jordan almonds!

Extra Borders

Now here are some quilts that used the same pattern but the quilter made some little changes and additions. The most common change people made to their Happy Scrappy quilts was to add an extra plain border or two to make it just that little bit bigger and/or to frame it beautifully.

Jane’s gorgeous rainbow version benefitted beautifully from having the extra plain borders to really showcase her clever colour order quilt!

Christine used a sweet pink print to add a border to her quilt.

Adapted Happy Scrappy Quilts

I absolutely love it when you take one of my patterns and make it work for you and what you want it for! There were quite a few quilters who made their Happy Scrappy quilts bigger, whether to use up more scraps or leftovers from the quilt top, or to make it a better size for what they needed.

Karen W made her’s longer at 50″ x 80″ as she was making it for charity, and that was the size they liked.

Josephine added on extra scraps and offcuts to make hers larger too. By having some low volume prints thrown in the mix for the extra borders, it helps create some movement and somewhere for the eyes to rest.

I love how Jacqui created some extra, symmetrical borders – again, using triangle offcuts from the Happy Scrappy quilt pattern, but also added a piano-key-esque border too.

Soili moved the side ribbon borders to the top and bottom to create a rectangular quilt, and added a row of squares to add a littlte extra width, and then a border to frame the whole quilt.

My jaw dropped when I saw the extra borders Meemer added to her Happy Scrappy quilt! She’s inserted a thin sashing border between the nine patches and the ribbon blocks, and again before adding some flying geese. The flying geese add so much movement! And the border print ties it all in together so beautifully.

Audrey also added a thin border between the ribbon blocks and a final, extra border of squares. Adding that little extra “blank space” helps create some contrast between medallion quilt borders, and gives your eyes somewhere to rest.

Penny has done the same thing, adding three thin borders before a final scrappy squares border for her red, black, and white quilt.

I love how Katie add an extra border of the ribbon blocks to turn them into a chevron pattern! Very clever addition.

Oh my goodness, anyone else just feeling so super inspired to go digging their scrap buckets again?! The Happy Scrappy quilt pattern will always remain as free tutorials on my website – you can find all the instructions here.

And if you really love the centre block like I did too, then you might also like to check out the quilt pattern in my shop that I designed from it: