I can finally say, after buying more material than ever needed by a non-sewer, over the years that I have officially finished a quilt! This is a big milestone for me and one that I hoped to achieve a lot sooner than I did.
Now, this quilt isn't big at all. Its actually very small, and has a hell of a lot of flaws, but it was made with love and purpose in mind.
I purchased a half jelly roll as a trial to see what I could come up with and in the end I went with a simple option, the jelly roll race. It is such a simple way to completing any form of quilt and was fun and easy for my first attempt.
I followed a YouTube tutorial by Missouri Star Quilt Company, and went with the 2.0 version of the race to add a bit of extra length to the pieces, hence making the quilt a little bit bigger in size.
The jelly roll was purchased from Spotlight in Australia, but as usual, they didn't carry any of the meterage so I had the task of finding something matching to work with.
I found that the outcome of the half jelly roll made the front of the quilt very long and narrow. To combat this I cut a length off it and sewed it into the back of the quilt. This reduced wastage and tied the backing into line with the front in terms of material choices.
The difficult part was the actually quilting - sewing both front and back with the wadding in the middle. Everything kept slipping, moving and puckering, but with a little bit of frustration, I got there in the end. I did have to insert a little bit of extra fabric for a small strip at the side to cover where the slipping went a little too far, but we got there in the end.
The binding wasn't done correctly either, there was no hand sewing to finish it off, it was machine all the way, but its ok. It didn't look too bad.
Once it was all together, I found my notes for this project.... It was a bit late to work out that I had planned on adding borders to make it a bit bigger. Ooops.
Oh, well. Its not perfect to say the least, but it is loved. And it makes your heart melt when this is the first thing the cheeky new owner does with it!
If you are looking at having a go at sewing something like this for a gift, your own child, or just a bit of fun, I can recommend this tutorial. It was a lot of fun and I cant wait to make another one (but this time I may just outsource the quilting part)!!
