My family lives in the UK and for many years I’ve been lucky enough to receive money for Christmas and birthday gifts which I’ve spent on fabric to make quilts. Last Christmas I used my money from my mother in law to buy rainbow fabric jelly rolls from Connecting Threads after I was inspired by a rainbow bargello quilt by Let’s Quilt Something. I particularly liked the method used to sew it and that it was promoted as a quick quilt top to sew.
I started this quilt in early March. You sew all the jelly roll strips together to form a tube and then you slice the tube into strips of varying widths and sew them all back together again. Easy Peasy, right? Ha! I tried that method but nothing was going right and it was incredibly frustrating! I worked out that one of the problems was that my jelly roll strips didn’t all measure the same 2 1/2 inch width and that, coupled with probably not the most accurate sewing, made my strips wonky and then they just refused to line up with each other. As you can see from the next picture the quilt was just getting wonkier and wonkier.
So there was no other option but to unpick it all!
I trimmed all the jelly roll strips so they were all the same widths and cut them into individual blocks and sewed them one at a time. Needless to say, this was turning into not such a quick quilt to make! The other change I made was to sew short strips into chunks rather than in lines and this kept the quilt nice and straight and flat. It took ages but I was much happier with the result.
So the quilt top that should have taken a weekend took almost four months haha! But I’d also injured my hand during this time so that didn’t help at all.
I used up some of the leftover jelly roll strips to make binding. I didn’t want one solid colour so I’m echoing the blocks on the outer edge.
I’m not going to quilt this right away so it’s been put away in my box storage system. Aren’t these gift boxes pretty?!
Now, what do I make next?
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