The Rainbow Kailia's Quilt

by Shelby Murray July 21, 2023

Today I am telling you all about my scrappy, rainbow Kailia's Quilt. This modern quilt took a while to make because cutting scraps is a lot of work! If you have made a scrappy quilt then you know. You also know the pride and feeling of never wanting to get rid of it once it's finished.

First, let's start with a bit about the Kailia's Quilt Pattern. This pattern is by default a scrappy quilt pattern. It uses half square triangles and striped blocks to create a modern, scrambled design. The more fabrics, the better it looks.

You can find a copy of Kailia's Quilt here.

Kailia's Quilt is fat quarter, precut and scrap friendly. I wrote it so all these options were included. This makes the pattern super versatile. It also means that most quilters would be able to make a version of the Kailia's Quilt without buying any fabric.

Part of the reason I designed this pattern was because of my overflowing scrap bin. I generally don't like keeping scraps around. So when I start to have too many I tend to give them away. I wish I had room to organize them and keep them, but our flat in India is small and I keep all my fabric in my bedroom. So my scraps need to live in a very small bin.

I had been keeping the extra binding strips from quilts. So my bin had lots of these very random long strips of fabric in them. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with such narrow strips of fabric. That's when I decided to design the Kailia's Quilt pattern to incorporate thin strips and scraps.

I have made several Kailia's Quilts so far, but this scrappy version is by far my favorite. It is probably partly because of the amount of time I put into making it. Digging through a scrap bin and figuring out which pieces of fabric are the correct size to use for a quilt takes a long time, especially when it goes with a color theme like this one.

More About the Pattern

Kailia's Quilt is written for the beginner quilter. It's a great pattern to master the 2 at a Time Half Square Triangle method. If you don't know what that is you can find a tutorial of that here.

With so many Half Square Triangles (HSTs) why doesn't the pattern use 8 at a Time or some other more efficient method of making HSTs? It's important for the scrappy look of the quilt to have as many combinations as possible of fabrics. For this reason, the pattern uses the "2 at a Time" method.

If you are using precuts or fat quarters, strip piecing is written in the pattern to make the striped blocks go a bit faster. For those using scraps, sorry, no strip piecing for you. :)

Kailia's Quilt has three sizes:

Baby (36 in. x 40 in.)

Throw (60 in. x 72 in.)

Twin (72 in. x 92 in.)

Kailia's Quilt Pattern doesn't have any background yardage. This makes it easy to grab a handful of fabrics and get sewing.

For my first version of the Kailia's Quilt I used a large fat quarter bundle I had purchased a couple years earlier. It had been gathering dust because honestly I didn't quite know what to do with that many fat quarters. I didn't want to pull the bundle apart, but most of the quilts I make didn't need that many fabrics.

The Kailia's Quilt is the perfect pattern if you have large fat quarter bundles in your stash.

You can find my first Kailia's Quilt here using a large fat quarter bundle curated by Megan from Then Came June.

My second Kailia's Quilt can be found here. I used a large fat quarter bundle of older Cotton and Steel Fabrics.

More About This Quilt

This quilt took me a couple months. In fact, I had a stolen several bowls from the kitchen to sort fabrics into from my scrap bag. I am sure my family found it irritating that the largest mixing bowls were missing for two months.

I started by sorting my fabrics into two categories, one for each unit of block made in the quilt. I knew the striped pieces needed to be long and thin, so the pieces that would work for these blocks went into one bowl, and the larger scraps that I could cut squares out of went into the other bowl.

I just randomly tried to throw in a variety of colors and then started sewing blocks based on the largest color groups I had. It probably would have been smarter, and saved time if I had planned a bit more in the beginning.

After starting to sew and realizing some of the blocks I had made were pretty, but didn't match very well into any of the rows of the rainbow I was making, I decided to leave some out. I am colorblind and making this quilt was quite hard for me. I asked my husband like 1,000 times if different fabrics were green. And I realized, all this time I thought I had been sewing with a lot of lime greens and I hadn't been! LOL!

After I had a good bit of blocks in a colorway I would lay them out on the kitchen table and make sure I had enough blocks and variety of fabrics.

I sewed each row at a time following the Kailia's Quilt measurements for a throw size.

This quilt took so much work that I didn't want to quilt it myself. So I put it to the side to bring it back to the states with me a couple months later. I had my friend, Kaitlyn from Knot and Thread Design, quilt it for me.