I was struck with the idea of making a quilt that looked like bubbles, just blown from the bubble wand - very random bubbles and very floaty.  Perhaps, more than anything, I wanted to quilt with machine quilted rows of stitches that were very close together.



When I decided to make this quilt I was gathering the fabrics for this quilt.  The fabrics I used for this bubble quilt were some of the rejects of the other quilt ... they ended up in a pile together and looked so nice that I just grabbed the pile and used them all.

I attached the circles to the base fabric by interfacing them and then using heat and bond ultra.  And my troubles began.  The heat and bond ultra gums the needle, causing stitches to skip frequently.  I cleaned that needle often with rubbing alcohol and while that helped it didn't solve the problem completely so there are missed stitches in the blanket stitching around the outer edges of the circles.  The interfacing, meant to make the blanket stitching go more smoothly, made the fabric really stiff.  After I did the quilting, the base fabric (which is actually much creamier than it looks in these pictures) had a lot of wrinkley goodness but the circles were hard as rock blobs that didn't have any wiggle room to them, so they wouldn't lay flat and looked more like frisbees than bubbles.



The backing is brown, so I used brown thread on the back and cream on the front.  Bad move.  The brown showed through.  Also, where I had to staystitch the thread showed quite a bit ... not cool.

The quilting itself was so much fun.  I absolutely loved sewing all those lines.  Very mesmerizing and relaxing.  I cannot wait to do it again.



I knew very early on that this quilt wasn't going to be salable.  I really didn't care, and knew I'd keep it for River or the daycare kids.

After finishing it I washed it, hoping that'd help.  As the closeup image above shows, it didn't.  The interfacing and heat and bond just weren't the right combination. But still, I adore it in all it's wonkiness.



I will, happily, make another similar quilt soon, but with a few (major) changes.