Jelly Roll Race a.k.a. The 1600 Quilt. Easy Quilt! Start to finish in 33 minutes!

Hi my name is cindy rang with the fabric patch in efredo washington and I'm going to show you how to make a

1600

quilt

or it's also known as a

jelly

run and I don't know there are probably other terms for it too. It's been around for a few years, it's kind of a fun

quilt

to make, it's very addictive, so we talked about it this morning in our morning chat and as I was trying to describe it, I think I actually confused more people than educated, so I said which would prove it real quick so we're alone here tonight in my sewing studio and I hope this goes well and the battery lasts so you can see it through to the end because it's incredibly fast once you do.

I've sewn all the pieces together, it's seven seams, so just for a very quick review, the reason it's called a Jelly Roll run is because you're using a Jelly Roll and what a Jelly Roll is is one of these that they call them. Different things are called designer rules they are called lollipops they are called I don't remember each fabric company has a different term for them but what it is is a collection of two and a half inch strips that we have sewn that they have cut for you and they have assembled so that they all look great together, so you can certainly buy one if you don't have a lot of leftovers, they come in all kinds of different colors and styles or if you have a lot of leftover fabric from other projects, you can cut it into two and a half inch strips or, as we mentioned, cut it into two or three inch strips, it doesn't really matter, it's just that there are so many two and half inch strip projects that I always have leftovers, so when I save my leftovers, I usually I have them out of my reach right now, but I usually try to keep them all together, so I have a lot of different things. it's from a

jelly

roll

some leftovers this is from another one and I just put them all together and when I have enough to make something I'll take them all out and that also means if you have a piece left over for your jelly

roll

your strip is usually two and a half inches by the width of the fabric, so it's about 40 or 42 inches, if you only have a little piece left over, throw it in there anyway because of course in a Jelly Roll

race

or a

1600

you want all those fun little bits which help make the quilt super interesting if you're

start

ing a new jelly roll and I'll mention this again at the end, you'll want to cut about 12 inches off the first strip you don't want they should all be the same length as you're sewing them together yeah that doesn't make sense, it will at the end when I show you something, but I always use my leftover stuff, so the one I'm going to use I use today, I have a couple of different pieces here and a couple of different leftover jelly rolls, in their Most of it is from a line called Fashion Elements.

I don't know if it's available anymore, but it's from sweetwater and you can see a lot of its stuff. very similar, so it's

easy

to just throw pieces in there and you'll quickly have a quilt that comes together and looks like something that was absolutely planned, so the only thing you need besides the two and a half inch strips is obviously your quilting machine. sew. and then I like to use a quarter inch foot, if you don't have one, it looks like it has a little blade on it, so whether you can see that or not, I like my quarter inch foot because then all I'm doing is What I'm doing is attaching my fabric right against that edge and it's just foolproof for my quarter inch seam so I like that and then the only other notion you need is a good pair of scissors so I don't really is as much a thread cut as it is. fabric scissors because what you're going to do first is cut all the edges this just has no place in your quilt this is just to tell us what the fabric is and give us a bit of a color guide there are a couple more fun things in there, but you don't want to sew with it so as you go through these strips it's only going to take a minute and you can do it while you're sewing or if you're someone who just likes to get it out of the way and I like to do it all at the beginning because it gives me a minute to review all the strips and make sure they are all the same width.

I think they all go well together and I'm just going to give them a little sneak peek to make it a little complicated, but that's what I like to do. Another thing I will mention is that if you use batiks Batiks not only don't have the wrong side of the fabric, they don't have a selvedge so all the more reason to love batiks so I'm going to do this real quick and cut off all my selvedges , okay, that's it. the scraps are cut and the other reason I like to go through and do all that at first is because I found two little stubborn pieces in there that were two inch strips, not two and a half, sometimes they look the same, maybe it's So.

It was something I just cut wrong, I'm not sure what I was doing there but when you

start

sewing things together you might not notice it until it's too late and then you have to rip something or something that's just unstable and possible You may not be sure what exactly is going on, so it's good to double check everything, make sure everything is okay, and see how many strips you have. I must admit that I don't know exactly how. I have a lot of them here because they're a couple of partial rules from a couple of other things I was doing, but I'm guessing there's at least 40 here, so I think there's quite a few, I guess we'll know when we get there. done, but there are a lot of half pieces and three-quarter inch or three-quarter length pieces, so okay, so they're all done, so the next thing is to sew them together end to end and to do that, I do it.

More important is not to give. It was a lot of thinking, don't worry, this one looks good with this one and shoots, I just picked that one, it's not going to matter, everything is going to touch everything, there's no opportunity to plan, I'll just say it. Right now it's just not happening, so don't worry about any of that. Okay, so what you're going to do is join chains because it makes it go a little bit faster, so I'm just going to put my right sides together and then I have to move my leg, okay, so doing chain joins, if you've sewn a seam, you'll just stop picking two more and again, don't go crazy, just put two right sides together to The right sides together, just keep grabbing two at a time, place them against the other two because all you're doing now is joining chains.

Keep grabbing two after chaining a piece to them. What happened is that's all you have. What you've done is put them together each time so you can quickly sew the next two together so you just want to cut them all out once you've cut them all out, take one, take another, we currently have them. sewn in groups of two, now we're going to sew them in groups of four, we're going to keep doing that until we end up with one big long strip, so groups of four, okay, the same thing has happened now that you have all of these that are all sewn together you are going to cut them and what will end up happening is that you will take this strip of four and you will sew it to this strip of eight.

I'm going to continue doing that because my main goal is, of course, is to end up with all these strips sewn together and end to end and again, it doesn't matter what it touches, it will eventually touch everything anyway, so it doesn't matter. It will make no difference what it will do to you. Crazy not that I'm trying to keep everything from getting tangled, so now I'm going down, now I'm going down to where I have figure eights and it's getting too much and it's going away. to get tangled, so after I cut my strips this time I'll just leave them in a little pile on the ground and pick up one at a time so I have here's an end and here's an end and now in place. of chain pieces, I'm just going to go ahead and work on my continuous length, so I'm going to go down until I find my end and again you can see I've got some of those short, weird pieces in there, just grab another one. find the end right there, right sides together, well that was the last one, so now what I have is this big long strip with all of them sewn together, that's where the name 1600 comes from because again it's a jelly roll which is 40 The 40 inch strips are 1600 inches, so what I'm going to do is have this end, I'm going to find the other end in this pile and here's the fun thing you don't have to like, sort it all out, don't you .

It doesn't matter, just look for the end wherever it is, so you just have to find the other end very easily now that you have the other end. I've got all those strips sewn together, however many there are now I'm just going to take one end and the other end and I'm going to put them together right sides together, all that mess, it doesn't matter, all I'm doing is right sides together to the bottom. I'll show you what it looks like. at the end, a quarter inch seam allowance, so you have 800 inches to sew, so it will take a little time, but it's half the time with each seam you're sewing as you get to the seams, I just sew them.

Leave them flat, I don't sew them open, but do what you think is best. The quarter inch seam allowance is important to make sure your quilt doesn't turn out too wavy and that's why I like the sheet, because all I have to do is just

finish

. my fabric right against it and just guide through there for a perfect quarter inch seam as you start to get to the end, what's going to happen is you're going to see that you have this weird twist that was inevitable because we just sorted from grab both ends so it doesn't matter, all you're going to do is go down to the end wherever that is and just cut it off, if you're not in exactly the right place it won't matter where you go.

To trim those edges at the end, you just want to make sure everything lays flat, so we're going to

finish

this seam and every once in a while that happens and you end up with the exact same color on top. the other color again it doesn't matter it doesn't make any difference don't be scared don't do anything weird it doesn't matter and obviously in the end we end up with the same color because we cut that strip in half ok So once we've done that, what we're going to do to do is to do everything again.

We started at about 1,600 inches and have sewn it all the way to the end, now we are at 800 inches. now we're going to take this end, find the other end, it's up here at the end, 800 inches away and now we're going to open this one up, open this one right sides together and we're going to sew this seam. We're not lining anything up because of course it's going to open like this, so you don't have to match it, we're just matching this side, okay, now I have 400 inches to sew, you're probably wondering. now as for pressing, you don't actually press anything until you're done.

One of the best pieces of advice people are given is that perfection is in the pressing and that's true, when you're putting together blocks you really need to press things open and make them. Make sure everything is lined up correctly, but this is not that type of quilt. All you're doing is sewing the edges, so you're creating a new seam with each stitch so that all the pressing can be done at the end, that's part of what makes it so fast? Halfway through this I have decided to stop using my foot pedal and start using my auto sew button.

I still have a broken leg and I didn't last long, so anyway if I push that. button just sew it, do it, the same thing will happen with this one, right, it's just that when we get to the end we'll have this weird twist, so it won't matter, same thing we're just going to flatten it out. Take this out and cut it out so we can, so it looks like this, so you can guess what we're going to do next, so we have where we are at 400 inches. Now let's take this end and take it all the way. down still quite long here to this top, so let's take and again we don't have to press, we don't care about any of that, all we're doing is sewing the right sides together and so I'm just worried about this seam up to the In the end, it will take me half the time of my last sew.

Same thing, this one, although it didn't have any kind of twist, so I'm going to sew it well. to the end, okay, so we're going to cut this one in half, okay, then you know what's going to happen, so we're right now, we're eight wide, I'm going to take this one, I'm going to find the end, which is getting approaching and I'm almost. done again without pressing because I'm just worried about this seam on this side right here the right sides together sew all the way down every time you start and stop this way it's always best to stop with the needle in the down position so the Things don't change much when you stop and pull things out and get ready to start sewing again and it's strange, although I wasn't trying, this one didn't twist at all, so if it twists, it doesn't.

It doesn't matter, you're just going to cut that. I'm going to go ahead and just cut it off now because I think it will be easier. Well, here we are, we're at the bottom and we're at. 16 wide and now the last thing is to do one last seam Bringing this is fine, so normally when you are making your jelly roll and you are making 42 1600 inch strips when you turn it over and sew them end to end five times, you end up with a quilt approximately 50 inches wide. At about 60 inches long, mine doesn't seem to beso big, it looks like it's probably about 40 inches so I guess the jelly roll or pieces I was using I probably should have started with them, I don't know.

I know maybe around 30 strips it was hard to tell because I had a lot of leftover pieces inside a lot of short pieces, so there's no clear math except what length you start with if you know you want one. quilt that will fit a specific bed, just start with a lot of strips, start with a couple of jelly rolls, not that you can't put a border on something like this, but anyway, we'll do this last seam and then we'll do it. What I'm going to do is press it after pressing it, I'm going to trim the edges, okay, that was the last one, I'm going to go ahead and just cut it with scissors because I have to iron it, that's it, that's my jelly roll

race

1600 or in this case, oh, I could have started with about 1200, but anyway I'm going to press it and square it and show you a finished image.

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