Let's Make A Jelly Roll Quilt

This is not a post about how to make a jelly roll race quilt. There are plenty of instructions and videos available; just Google jelly roll race quilt and take your pick. Rather this is a bunch of photos of three women (and one onlooker) who decided to spend some time together and each make a quilt.

I was the only one who actually bought a (or bought an actual) jelly roll. After much deliberation I bought this one from Missouri Star Quilt Co. By coincidence this was also the company where I had first watched how to make a jelly roll race quilt.



My two compadres cut their own 2 inch strips from their own fabric supply. (OK one of them had a nice mother who did it for them.)

I decided to just sew my strips together as they came off the roll as had been suggested in one video. I also joined my strips with a straight seam as suggested in another blog. These two methods made it easy to align strips. Originally I chose the straight join as I liked the look in the one I saw on-line. Also it would have taken me for ever to join the strips on the diagonal. The other two chose strips at random and joined on the diagonal. This meant I "won" the first part of the race.

Here are my strips waiting to be sewn together and then after they have been sewn together but before cutting the threads.



Jenny sewing her strips. We knew it was serious when Jenny put her headband on.





After sewing together, I pressed open all my seams and smoothed out the wrinkles in the fabric, folded the strip in half and folded it in my lap to keep it under control while sewing the first seam.

Here it is sitting nicely in my lap and coming off the machine.



Elizabeth wrangling her first long strip all 1600 inches.



And Jenny with hers.



As each seam gets shorter the sewing time should get shorter but I didn't feel that was the case and I soon fell behind. Elizabeth showed Jenny how to wrap the strip around the newel post to ease the folding in half.




Elizabeth won the race.



(She was in a hurry as she had to pick up her children.)

Then Jenny.



And finally me.



And here is our onlooker, Lisa, concentrating on the sock she is knitting.



And the obligatory cat photo.



And now we all want to make another one, except we should finish these completely first. I am going to add borders to mine before backing, binding and quilting as I would like it to be bigger.

The things that I have learned from this first one: I do like the diagonal join but I would need much more time to ensure every strip lined up correctly; joining the strips as they come off the roll produces a nice enough quilt but the colours are spaced too regularly; don't eat a chocolate chip muffin and sew at the same time; you can sew with friends and produce something and have fun.