Monday, January 30, 2023

Mindless Sewing, without Cutting

I've been doing a lot of cutting lately for kits for charity quilts (see this post). So much so that the tendon problem in my hands has flared up. Time to give my hands a rest from cutting. 

I was in the mood for some mindless sewing the other day, so I pulled out a jelly roll I won at STLMQG's ticket raffle a long time ago. I don't really like jelly rolls, and this one's been languishing for years. The fabrics are very pretty Provincial prints from American Jane. I figured I could just sew it into a jelly roll race, no cutting required, and make a charity quilt. 

Jelly roll race quilts are what they are - since there's no control over where the prints land next to each other, sometimes the colors and prints aren't spread out evenly over the quilt. If you want this kind of mindless sewing, you don't get a perfectly planned top. We'll see how this one ends up. 

What I'm more excited about is the back. Here are the fabrics: 

There's one yard of the white print and two yards of the blue. These are also American Jane, from a different collection than the jelly roll. The blue here is darker and all the colors are slightly brighter. 

The one yard of white is from before 2012. I bought it when I was still working because I thought it was pretty and I was going to make a simple skirt. That never got made. The blue came from someone's estate sale here in PC a few months ago. When I saw it I knew it was the same as the white version I already had and I could use them together. 

I got lucky. I needed to piece the one yard length of white into a two-yard length by 1/2 WOF. The print repeat was such that I could match the pattern precisely and unless you know there's a seam, you can't tell it was pieced. I split the blue into 1/2 WOF and added it to both sides of the white for a large enough backing. 

I scored an unbooked time slot on PCQ's long arm over the weekend and got this quilted. I'll bind it this week and post photos Friday. The front is ~ meh; the back is really cool. 


Linking up with Small Quilts and Doll Quilts



3 comments:

  1. The backing prints look great. Sometimes mindless sewing is just what we need, and congratulations for moving a jelly roll out of your stash, regardless of how the top turned out.

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  2. I just pieced a print backing where I matched the repeat…..so satisfying, right? And how awesome to move an old jelly roll, old yardage and a freebie into a quilt….triple treat!

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  3. I've made one quilt where the back is cooler than the front. Now I wish I'd put the label on the "front" of the quilt. Sometimes it just takes a bit for the front to grow on you, maybe that will be the case for this project.

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