Jim’s Quilt

One of the women in my sewing group told me that her husband wanted to make a quilt. Next thing I knew, he had finished the top.
He said he had grown up with quilts and had always loved them. Now he almost has one. Onto the basting, and quilting!

Those autumn colors are going to look beautiful in their mountain home.

Make your own jelly roll race roll

Our quilting group at church is prolific, and as such we end up with a lot of scraps. Recently we cut our scraps into 2.5 inch strips, sorted them by color or theme and sewed them together to make a “home-made” jelly rolls. We scheduled a sewing day and had a lot of fun stitching.


With left over strips from my Christmas placemats and napkins I made a Christmas quilt for a door prize at our church's annual neighborhood children’s Christmas party. The woman who won the quilt was thrilled.
In case you want to try making your own jelly roll, here’s a calculator, or just use the chart I worked up for our group. Our group is hooked on making them. Fastest charity quilt ever!
A commercial jelly roll has 40 strips in it, cut the width of fabric. This will make one long strip of about 1600 inches long which will make a quilt about 50-52” wide by 64” long. If using a commercial roll, make sure you cut about 18” off one end of your first strip. Jenny Doan has a great video on YouTube.
To make the same size quilt from random 2.5” strips, you will need 1600 inches of fabric after sewing the ends together. Since the strips are random length, no need to make any cuts off the end.
For a Baby quilt, or a 32” x 32” quilt, use 13 and one half strips from a commercial roll. If using random strips, you’ll need 560” of strips sewn end to end. If desired, you can add borders to make it larger. (You will only sew these strips 4 times)
To make a Jelly roll quilt larger than 50X64”, add 42” to your roll for each inch of desired width. See chart below for approximate measurements

Desired length of quilt	Desired width of quilt	# of continuous inches needed
32	32	560
64	50	1600
64	55	1814
64	60	2028
64	64	2184
70	64 (stripes will be vertical)	2628

These are approximate lengths, but give a fair estimate of the amount of fabric needed.
Remember that in a jelly roll quilt, the width doubles each time you sew a seam
First seam 4.5” wide
Second seam 8.5” wide
Third seam 16.5“ wide
Fourth seam 32.5 “ wide (stop here for baby quilt)
Fifth seam 64.5” wide.
To make a king size quilt you will need approximately 6400 inches of strips sewn end to end! If you had that much fabric, you would make a sixth seam for a quilt that measured about 128” long by 100 wide. Obviously, if you wanted it wider, you would add more length to your strip.
When storing your strips I would suggest folding or rolling them with the two ends on the outside so you can immediately begin sewing. We had a hard time with the rolls twisting as we sewed the first two strips together.

Four Quick Quilts

Try saying that fast seven times.
We had some fabric remaining from our sanctuary quilt projects, so rather than stash it, I made some quick quilts for people in our congregation who are no longer able to attend church.

This one was designed like the sanctuary  quilt which I made for our congregation’s 90th anniversary. I did free motion spirals in the gold and dark blue sections, and did channel quilting 3/4” apart in the border. This quilt measures about 45” square.

These two medallion quilts measure about 40” square. I did cross hatch quilting on them, one with dark blue thread, the other with gold thread.



This quilt started out as the back for the St. Andrews cross quilt, but when I took it to my Wednesday morning sewing group for help in pin basting, they convinced me it would look beautiful on its own.

There was a lot of negative space and I decided to fill it with serpentine stitching. The stitching rows are 1.5” apart.

I did all the bindings by machine. Although I love a hand sewn binding, I’m getting better at machine binding. I think the key is to use a very skinny thread in the bobbin that blends with the backing fabric. In some of these I used Superior Bottom Line, a 60 wt. poly thread. In others I used Wonderfil Invasifil, a 100 wt. poly thread.

Iron Bowl Sewing Machine

We ate a lot of food and watched a lot of sports events this weekend. The Auburn v Alabama was one of the most exciting. If you missed it, someone on the Auburn equipment staff pulled out a sewing machine and repaired a jersey during the game. This guy looks like he knows his way around a machine.

The Twitter universe lit up, and the sewing machine has its own twitter account with a myriad of puns. If you are on Twitter, you can follow at @ausewingmachine
Now back to eating leftovers