The not-quite-a-jelly-roll-race

Once upon a time, I found some pretty fabric. I’m not sure what it was about it that I liked - actually, it’d be the butterflies, and the fact that I have nieces. It was right when I started on this crazy fabric addiction, so I grabbed a jelly roll, and it has sat in my stash ever since.

It's a 2012 collection, so looking around the interwebs I can only find one or two pieces still available anywhere.  Interestingly, it's by Patty Sloniger, who also designed Les Amis and Backyard Baby (you know the one with the little bugs in bottles!) both of which I totally love and have hoarded in my sewing room, so it goes to show, that firstly - I love all her stuff  and secondly - I have always had good taste ;-)

Anyway... Back to the quilt.  My pretty little jelly roll arrived wayyyyyyyyy back in 2012/2013 and I pulled it apart and just loved it.  But all together it was a wee bit busy and you couldn’t see the pretty delicate details.  I felt like it needed white…

You know me, by now, so you know that I sat on it for forever and a day...

Snap forward a couple of years and I finally ordered some white fabric on purpose to turn this into something.  In fact, I got really smarty-pants and ordered a white jelly roll, which meant it was already cut up (perfectly) and I had the exactly right number of strips! It’s totally cheating, but they don’t call me the lazy quilter for nothing ;-)

And then the two jelly rolls got tucked into the cupboard side by side (because they were going to go together!.. It’s semi-organised chaos) and waited and waited... See above about how I never actually work on those projects that I mean to..

Well the time had come!!

I grabbed those rolls and got my sew on.  I needed something simple and calming. I wanted to just get back in my groove. I was scared to do something that required exacting piecing. I was even scared to do paper piecing, because, what if I couldn’t sew on the line… I just needed something I knew I could do, ok.  Don’t tell me I’m the only one who has these crises of confidence. I was having a moment.

But I can sew one end to another end, and have that work out ok.

It’s a fake jelly roll race, because I didn’t do the end to end to end to end thing. I paired up a colour and a white and then I laid them out on my floor (super precise in my house) and wiggled them around a bit.

I tried to get the blue vs green vs pink ratios right. And I tried to get the left to right balance right.  I also tried to do random groupings so that there are areas of white and blocks of colour, but, it’s all about balance (isn’t it always).

I’m actually really happy with how it’s come together.  It might not be the most exciting or innovative quilt in the world, but it has that soft calm vibe that I wanted. I think that it will make a little girl very happy. In fact, I think it might be destined for my biggest niece.  Initially I thought too much little girly-ness for her, but I think the white helps to give it a slightly more grown-up, tween vibe. She’s only 9 so pretty much exactly tween size.

It is (as always) a bit of a weird size.  I basically picked a random width that felt about right (60” by the way) and then just laid out all the strips. It’s ended up being about 80” long.  I like that. I like having something wide enough to wrap around yourself and long enough to tuck in your toes. But it’s a weird size for a bed.  I seem to have a very bad habit of ending up with odd shaped quilts, but I’m not going to worry too much about it :-P

I have to grab a backing and then sort out quilting it.  I'd love to do it myself, but there's an awful lot of white there that will show up any mistakes... I have a vision of great big love hearts all over it, but if I mess it up... hmmmm.

But the real question is.. how long do you recon it's going to take before I actually finish this??

E xx