THE JELLY ROLL TWIST

These last few days our cold and rainy weather finally seemed to take a break and we have been out in our backyard doing an overhaul of the planting areas and generally just cleaning up and scaling down the clutter.  So I have not had a great deal of time to spend in my sewing room. 

My daughter sent me a pattern and it seemed a really great idea to make into table toppers for our upcoming January quilt show's boutique.  I will measure 17" square when finished.

While the pattern supplied by The Fat Quarter Shop uses Jelly Rolls and Charm Packs I have a good supply of red fabrics that could be cut in the 5" squares and 2.5" strips.

Oh yes, lots of red fabric left overs and yes I did pop in to Hobby Lobby and pick up an additional 7 half yards.  More is always better!

And I have a good supply of blues left over from a Jelly Roll Race quilt top I finished off a couple weeks ago.

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THE WILD ONE AND THE THANK GOODNESS IT IS FINISHED

This last couple of weeks I have been working on two projects.  One for my charity group and one just for fun.  Fabric is taking over the sewing room so I have been trying to get around to just doing something with some of these fabric collections besides them just sitting on the shelves in the closet or wire bins.  

This wild print collection has been hanging around for probably years in the closet.  The idea was to just put something together and give it to my guild's charity group.  Somewhere along I sort of fell in love with it.  Not my normal fabric choices.  The blocks are 9 inches finished, the top three rows are sewn together just finishing up the bottom two now.  At 45" square finished it still seemed a bit small and needing some calming down.  I decided to find fabric for a border and binding and did get that purchased just this past week.  It is going to be a keeper at least until I find another home for it.  Stay toned for its finished over the next week or two.  

Chop Stix5 from last week is finished.  It was somewhat of a challenge for some reason.  There were several trips back and forth laying it out on the bed to figure out all those sides and corners.  This project was a charity group request for me to put together for them.  There were a few days when I bundled it up and set it aside thinking it might go back to them half finished.  In the end it worked out well and will probably quilt up beautifully.

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JELLY ROLL RACING

 This week I decided to tackle my 2.5" strips.  I am in the habit when making bindings, to take the left overs and keep them.  I also when cutting strip for binding find that if I have just a bit of the fabric left over and it is enough to cut just one more strip I do that as well.

My method is this large glass jar.  I just toss them into it.  Sometimes there are even bags with 5 to even 7 matching strips in it.  Those are the ones that I cut for a quilt, and then forgot I did that and cut more later when the quilt returned from my quilter.  Over a period of time the jar has become very full.

And this is what I end up with, except the blue piles were much much lager than shown here.

The end results, it measures 56" by 60" and a binding prepared to go with it.  Off to my charity group and looks like those red, yellow, purple, green, turquoise and yes still some blue strips left over are next.

Yes, definitely need to do something with the other colors and prints.  And I am off to the Jelly Roll Races with 10 rows done and 40 to go.

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WONKY WALL HANGINGS AND CHOP STIX5

 I finished my wonky block wall hanging this past week.  A fun project using left over fabric from the previous week's pleated quilt top craziness.  I gave the pleated blocks quilt top to my charity group admitting to them it was likely to be one big headache to quilt.  Go figure, they loved it and the group had all sorts of quilting ideas for it. 

Quilting the wonky blocks with a straight line diaginal pattern every two inches seemed like the best way to  handle it.

I put a larger binding on it 3" rather than my usual 2.5".

It was finished off with a hanging sleeve on the back.  I think it will make a nice wall hanging next winter for our entry hall.  I was happy to make good use of the fabrics I really liked so much in the pleated quilt.

After turning in the pleated quilt project in to the group they handed me another charity group project.  This pattern and all the fabric to make it in a bag ready to go.

I have had the project home since Wednesday afternoon so decided to start working on it right away.  Fun project with fun fabrics.  the white fabric does have a light gold yellow floral print in it.  Hard to see here.  Should have this ready to return to them by next month's meeting in April all finished and ready to go to a quilter.

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PLEATED BLOCKS OUT AND WONKY BLOCKS IN

After last week's pleated quilt issues, I was bummed out that all that pretty fabric was used up only to discover that I actually had a pretty good supply of left overs.  I happened to have a picture of an interesting quilt idea and thought it might be a fun idea for those fabrics.

These wonky blocks on this quilt out of Circle Play by Reynola Pakusich looked interesting.  There was no pattern in the book so I figured to get on the internet and see if I could find some instructions on making some similar blocks. 

Sure enough several YouTube sites offered help making them.  I did learn that while they suggested using 9 fabrics to make 9 blocks, in the future to get a bit more variety I would increase that by at least another 2 or 3 fabrics.  However, I was limited on left over fabrics.

The top is complete and now just to quilt it and get a binding on it.  Again I wish I had a bit more variety, as only using 9 fabrics you get 9 repeats, but it was a fun exercise playing with the idea.  I think it is something I will revisit with more fabric choices.  I should have it quilted this week and bound.

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