Straight Lines

And this is the first thing 'wot I made on my very own'!

It looks cleverer than it is, and as you will see, was more or less an accident. It's a 'jelly roll race' quilt- and if you youtube search it you will find how-to videos but actually they are pretty simple as a rule, so naturally I had to make it more complicated.

In a jelly roll race quilt, you use a packet of precut strips of fabric called, amazingly, a jelly roll. These are 2.5in by.... oooh the length of cotton quilting weight fabric, selvedge to selvedge, what is that in inches? 44 inches I think. You sew the ends together to make one long strip, then sew them together to make a fatter strip, and so on and so on until hey presto, a quilt top. Quick, simple and practically impossible to go wrong. Har har.

I bought this jelly roll from Amazon, and it's called, I think, Shibori and is an import (which I will no doubt whinge about another time.) of lovely tie-dye fabrics in rainbow colours. Now, I wanted half the strips for something else, and given there were two of each colour, I divided the pack in half. Then I got thinking. A half size quilt would have half as many lovely diagonals between the colours, which wouldn't be very many, so I cut the strips in half, putting them into two piles, then put one pile on the top. Then sewed them together and proceeded as one would a jelly roll quilt.

I didn't quilt or bind this for ages, because these were new skills I was a bit too nervous to learn at that stage. But I still count this as the first thing I ever made. Almost the last, too, because when I ended up with this, I was a teeny bit gutted. The whole point of a jelly roll race quilt is that it is random, and mine wasn't random at all!! Then of course I realised that when I cut the strips in two, I should have then jumbled them up. I had, effectively, put them into a pattern- 20 colours followed by 20 colours in exactly the same order. I don't know if that would always make a pattern like this, but I intend to find out some time because really, y'know, it's grown on me. It looks awfully clever and deliberate, not to mention original, as opposed to the happy accident it in fact was. So now I need to do it again to find out!