SpinnySpinny

I had to think about it a while, but now having done a couple of things with pre-cut fabrics for quilting I’m happy with the results. I’m not a huge scrap quilt fan so I don’t need to obsess over how many different designs are in my project. I buy several jelly rolls because I want duplicates, plus the ability to divide the set into multiple projects and still get something decently sized. I don’t see myself doing a complicated original design out of a pre-cut set, but I’m also not doing many of those kinds of quilts.

A matching collection of fabrics is nice for gifts, I don’t have to worry about getting the arrangement just so because it will look good pretty much whatever I do. I think 40 strips in a jelly roll is a little limiting because you have to add a lot of other fabric to get a decent bed quilt, but it’s a minor quibble because I have a closet full of possible choices.

Here is one of my current projects, from Summer Fun. I started with two jelly rolls, two charm packs, a layer cake and some additional yardage. From it I’ll get at least three projects, the first is a bed quilt. Here is the first section of completed blocks:

Once I sorted the pieces I wanted to include and cut strips, it was mindlessly simple to sew the blocks together. The worst thing that happened was I accidentally stitched one block with one of the pieces wrong side up. The layer cake and charm packs went together easily into the three block types. Putting together the smaller charm squares was dead simple and the others were only a little more complicated. It’s instant gratification quilting.

There were enough colors that I could arrange the blocks and sashing so no identical fabrics touched, even after setting aside all the reds for sashing squares and binding. I didn’t really plan how many of each type of block, it just worked out with the number of squares I pulled from the packages for my 42 blocks. I made some with 3 triangle because I had an odd number of layer cake squares and couldn’t match them all in pairs. I think it improved the overall design, which was to make as “random” as arrangement as I could devise. (If it were really random, the fabrics and blocks wouldn’t be so evenly distributed.)

I’ve got a couple things underway, both from some precut fabrics I bought. I had two Love is in the Air jelly rolls, I took the brown strips for a small quilt and the rest for a larger one.

With the brown strips, I combined them with two other pink and brown fabrics and made rail fence blocks in a pinwheel arrangement. There are six different fabrics in my brown strips, so I’ll have six slightly different types of blocks.

From the remaining pink, white and green strips I added some additional pink fabric and I’m working on a log cabin and star design. When I’m done I’ll have directions to post but I want to make sure they actually worked first. It’s fairly complicated and I tried to cut the strips as efficiently as possible, which was a challenge.