Quilt Day

A few weeks ago (I'm pretty behind on blogging) I got together with two of my crafty friends and we made quilts. Rebecca's mom was in town and she is an avid quilter so we wanted her expertise. We met at 10:00 that morning and I didn't get home until 9:30 that evening. To say we enjoyed ourselves is an understatement! It was also Rebecca's birthday so she called our get-together her grown-up birthday party.

We all made the same type of quilt. We watched this tutorial on Youtube to learn to tube quilt. It turned out to be fun and simple. I highly recommend this type of quilting if you are a beginner.

We all started with 2 jelly rolls (these are rolls of 2 1/2 by 42 inch strips of fabric).

 We then went by the tutorial and cut another strip of fabric in a coordinating color. We sewed two strips of the jelly roll together and then sewed that on to the coordinating color strip. This made our fabric tube.

 Whirrrrrrrr!

We then used our square to cut the fabric tube to get blocks. I guess I didn't take a picture of the cutting part. If you are really interested, though, go watch the tutorial and you will understand what I'm talking about. 

After cutting the tube, we ironed the pieces flat which gave us small squares. Each tube gave us around 10 small squares.

The tutorial says that you can make your quilt in a chevron pattern. This ended up not to be true (more on that in a minute), but we didn't know so we all laid our blocks out in a chevron.

Rebecca picked this beautiful orange and blue jelly roll with a coordinating blue fabric.

Kristin and I are way too much alike and chose the same jelly rolls! She did get a lighter pink coordinating fabric, though.

We were so disappointed when Kristin sewed a strip of chevron together and the points didn't line up! Since we were all beginners we didn't even think about the fact that this can not mathematically work out since the blocks made a perfect chevron when all laid out not sewn. Once you factor in the 1/4 inch seam allowance there is no way this could work.

My mom, who is also an avid quilter, said that she has used several patterns that gave wrong information and that it is nothing new to have to rethink your quilt.

I finished making my blocks (or so I thought) while I was with my friends and then took them home to figure out what the new pattern was going to be.

 

I ended up doing a diamond pattern instead but did have to make a few more square for it to work out correctly. I ended up with a stack of leftover squares because I wanted there to be a pattern in the quilt even though the chevron did not work out. To achieve this, I had to discard some squares and make others. Kristin is making a quilt for her daughter's twin bed so I gave my extra squares to her to use. At least they didn't go to waste!

I still need to put a border on the quilt and then I have chosen to back it in minky and tie it. I think I will be listing this quilt on Etsy once I am finished with it.