Meet Pandamonium - Cotton and Joy's first pattern of 2025!
Pandamonium is a fun and modern quilt pattern, perfect for panda lovers! I've been working on this quilt pattern for nearly nine months, so I'm thrilled to finally have it in out the world!
The Story Behind Pandamonium
After creating Annabelle last year, a lot of people asked me if cows were my favorite animal. If you've read the blog post, you know that quilt pattern was actually created for a friend. But that begged the question, what about my favorite animal?
I have loved pandas for years and years. Something about how unbothered they are, their fluff factor, I just love them. I love them so much that 15 years ago when my now-husband and I got a new dog, we named her Panda Bear.
Panda brought the fluff factor into our family for nearly 15 years. She was my girl. She always spent time with me and lived up to her name–being completely unbothered, always fluffy, and loved naps. This quilt pattern is as much an ode to her, our sweet girl, as it is to the white and black bears.
I wish more than anything that she was still with us, but she passed in October of last year, but we'll have this quilt to remember her!
Choosing Colors
As I mentioned above, I've been working on this quilt pattern for nearly nine months. I played with the block in Illustrator for weeks to get the details and proportions just right. Once I did have it just right, I faced a bit of a conundrum.
I usually use white for my quilts' background, but the pandas' faces are white, so I couldn't use white for the background. Around that time, my friend Lindsey of Pen and Paper Patterns released her Best Buds quilt pattern, which features a checkerboard look, and this gave me the idea of doing something similar for this pattern.
I also loved the idea of stepping away from the traditional black-and-white colors, so I began to play around with the idea of contrasting the panda details and the blocks' background colors. After much back and forth and playing around with the fabric requirements, I went with a 1/2 yard requirement where two contrasting colors give a total of four blocks.
Once I had that decided, I went to my fabric stash and started pulling solids. I started with the purples and went from there. Why purple? When we got our pup, she was the "purple" puppy in the litter, plus it's my favorite color!
Quilting Details
I was running all sorts of behind while working on this pattern, so I didn't have time to send this off to a long-armer. That presented me with another conundrum–how to quilt this. I almost went with my trusty straight-line quilting 3/4" apart. I even did three lines of quilting, but it just felt wrong. So I picked them out and went with the wavy quilting. I've never used that quilting on a quilt this big, but it felt right!
I love how this quilting softens the overall look of the quilt!
For the backing and binding, I kept things pretty simple. I used POParazzi in Aqua and solid white for the binding–to contrast nicely with the blocks and brings out the white on the panda faces.
Quilt Information
Quilt Pattern: Pandamonium by Cotton and Joy
Fabric: Confetti Cottons Solids in Orchid, Princess, Peacock, Aqua, Golden, Sunshine, Hot Pink, Frosting, and White. [Purchase the kit!]
Binding: Confetti Cottons Solids in White
Pieced and Quilting on my Janome M8
Purchase the Pattern
