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 roll race and i don't know there's probably other terms for it as well it's been around for a few years it's kind of a fun quilt to make it's very addicting to make so we did talk about it this morning in our morning chat and while i was trying to describe it i think i actually confused more people than educated so i said i would just demonstrate it really quick so we're just alone here tonight in my sewing studio and i'm hoping this goes well and the battery lasts so you can see it through the end because it is crazy fast um once you've sewn all of your pieces together it's seven seams so um so just for a really fast review the reason it's called the jelly roll race is because you're using a jelly roll and what a jelly roll is is it's one of these they call them different things they're called designer rules they're called lollipops they're called i can't remember every every fabric company has a different term for it but what it is is it's a collection of two and a half inch strips that they've sewn that they've cut for you and they've put together so they all look great together so you can certainly purchase 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 project fabric from other projects you can cut it into two and a half inch strips or as we mentioned cut it into two inch strips or three inch strips it doesn't really matter it's just that there are so many two and a half inch strip projects out there that i always have leftovers always have leftovers and so when i store my leftovers i generally i have it out of reach at the moment but i generally try to keep them all together so i have a bunch of different this is from one jelly roll some leftovers this one is from another one and i just put them all together and when i have enough to make something i'll kind of pull them all out and that also means if you have a leftover chunk so your jelly roll your strip is two and a half inches typically by width of fabric so it's about 40 or 42 inches if you have just 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 funny little bits it helps to make the quilt super interesting if you're starting with a brand new jelly roll and i'll mention this again at the end you will want to cut about 12 inches off of your first strip you don't want them to all be the same length as you're sewing them together if that doesn't make sense it will at the very end when i show you something but um i always just use my leftover stuff so the one that i'm going to use today i have a couple of different pieces in here and a couple of different leftover jelly rolls mostly it's from a line called elements from moda i don't know that it's available anymore but but it's by sweetwater and a lot of their stuff all looks really similar so it's easy just to throw bits in there and you'll quickly have a quilt that will come together and look like something that was absolutely planned so the only thing you need besides your two and a half inch strips is obviously your sewing machine and then i do like to use a quarter inch foot if you don't have one it looks like that there's a little blade on it so if you can see that or not but i like my blade quarter inch foot because then all i'm doing is butting my fabric right up against that edge and it's just fool proof for my quarter inch seam so i like that and then the only other notion that you need is a good pair of scissors and so it's not really thread snips as much as it's fabric scissors because what you're going to do first is you're going to cut all of your selvages off this is just not this has no place in your quilt this is just to tell us what the fabric is and it gives us a little color guide a couple other fun things in there but you don't want to sew with it so as you go through these strips it's just going to take a minute and you can do this as you're sewing or if you're somebody who just likes to kind of get it out of the way and i kind of like to just do it all at first because it gives me a minute just to check all of the strips make sure that they're all in fact the same width make sure that i think they all play well with each other and i'm just going to kind of give them a quick little once over so it's a little fussy but that's what i like to do one other thing i'll mention is that if you use batiks batiks not only do not have a wrong side of their fabric they do not have a selvage so one more reason to love batiks so i'm just going to go through this really quick and cut off all of my selvedges [Music] [Music] okay all done all of the salvages are cut off and the other reason that i like to go through and just do all of that at first is because i found two little rogue pieces in there that were two inch strips not two and a half they sometimes look the same maybe it was something that i just cut wrong i'm not sure what it was even doing in there but when you start sewing things together you may not notice it until it's a little bit too late and and then you've got some ripping to do or something that's just sitting wonky and you might not be sure exactly what's going on so it's good just to double check everything make sure everything is all right and just kind of see how many strips you have i have to admit i don't know exactly how many i have here because it's a couple of partial rules from a couple other things i was doing and so but my guess is that there's at least 40 here so i think there's quite a few i suppose we'll know by the time we're done but there's a lot of half pieces and three quarter inch or three quarter length pieces so okay so these are all done so the next thing is just to sew them together end to end and so to do that the big thing is don't give it a whole lot of thought don't worry that does this one look good with this one and shoot i just picked that one up it's not going to matter everything is going to touch everything there is zero opportunity for planning i'm just gonna tell you right now it just doesn't just doesn't happen so don't worry about any of that all right so what you're gonna do is i do chain piecing 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 chain piecing if you've sewn one seam you're just going to stop pick two more and again don't be crazy just grab two right sides together [Music] [Music] [Music] so right sides together just keep grabbing two at a time butt them up against the other two because all you're doing right now is chain piecing just keep grabbing any two [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] after you've chained piece to them what's happened is is just that all you've done is you've butted them up against each time so that you can quickly sew the next two together so you just want to cut all of them apart once you've cut all of them apart take one take another one we currently have them sewn in groups of two now we're going to sew them in groups of four we're just going to keep doing that until we end up with one great big long strip so groups of four [Music] okay same thing has happened now you have all of these that are all sewn together you're going to cut them apart and what will end up happening is you'll take this strip of four sew it to this one strip of eight i'm just going to keep doing that because my whole goal is of course to end up with all of these strips sewn and to end to end to end and again it doesn't matter what touches what it's all going to touch everything eventually anyway so it's not going to make any difference what's going to make you crazy is not that it's i'm trying to keep everything from not tangling [Music] [Music] so now i'm getting down so now i'm getting down to where i've got strips of eight and so it's just getting to be too much and it's going to get tangled so after i cut my strips apart this time i'm just going to drop them in a little heap on the floor and pick up one at a time so that i've got here's an end and here's an end and now instead of chain piecing i'm just going to go ahead and work in my one continuous length so i'm going to go down until i find my end and again you can see i have some of those weird short pieces in there just grab another one find the end just there right sides together [Music] [Music] okay that was my last one so now what i've got is this great big long strip with all of them sewn together so that's where the name 1600 comes from is because again one jelly roll which is 40 40 inch strips is 1600 inches so what i'm going to do is i 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 it doesn't matter just look for the end wherever the end is [Music] so [Music] you just have to find the other end easy peasy now that you have the other end i've got all of those strips sewn together however many it is now i'm just going to take one end and the other far end and i'm going to put them together right sides together that whole tangle it doesn't matter all i'm doing is right sides together all the way down i'll show you what it looks like at the end quarter inch seam allowance [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so you've got 800 inches to sew so it is going to take a little while but it gets it's half the time with each seam that you're sewing as you get to your seams i just sew them flat i don't sew them open but do what you feel is best the quarter inch seam allowance is important to make sure that your quilt isn't super wavy and that's why i like the blade because all i have to do is just butt my fabric right up against it and it just guides right through there for a perfect quarter inch seam [Music] [Music] as you start to get to the end what's going to happen is you'll see you have this weird twist which was sort of inevitable because we just sort of grabbed the two ends so it doesn't matter all you're going to do is come down to the end wherever that is and just cut it if you're not exactly in the right spot it's not going to matter you're going to trim up those edges at the end you just want to make sure that everything is going to lay flat so we're going to finish this seam and every once in a while that happens where you end up with exactly the same color on top of the other color again it doesn't matter doesn't make any difference don't freak out don't do anything weird doesn't matter and obviously at the end we ended up with the same color because we cut that strip in half okay so once we've done that now what we're going to do is we're going to do the whole thing again we started with roughly 1 600 inches we've sewn that together all the way down now we're at 800 inches now we're going to take this end find the other end right it's up here at the end 800 inches away and now we're going to open this one up open this one up 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 that right so you don't have to match it we're just matching this side okay so now i've got 400 inches to sew [Music] [Music] you're probably wondering about now about pressing there isn't really any pressing that happens until you're done some of the best advice with people is that the perfection is in the pressing and that's true when you are piecing blocks you really do need to press things open and make sure that everything lines up properly but this isn't that kind of quilt all you're doing is you're sewing edges so you're creating a new seam with every stitch so the pressing can all be done at the end that's part of what makes it so [Music] quick [Music] so halfway through this i've decided to stop using my foot pedal and start using my automatic sewing button i have a still have a broken leg and so um i didn't last very long so anyway if i push that button it just sews [Music] [Music] do [Music] so the same thing will happen with this one right is that by the time we get down to the end we're going to have this weird twist so it's not going to matter same thing we're just going to flatten this out and cut it so that we can [Music] okay so looks like this right so you can guess what we're doing next right so we've got where are we at 400 inches now we are going to take this end bring it all the way down still pretty long up here to this top so we're going to take and again we don't have to press we don't care about any of that all we're doing is we're sewing right sides together and so we're just worried about this seam all the way down it's going to take me half the time of my last seam [Music] [Music] [Music] okay same thing this one though didn't have any kind of a twist in it so i'm just going to sew it right to the end okay so we'll cut this one in half okay so you know what's gonna happen right so we are at the moment we are eight wide i'm gonna take this one find the end which is getting closer and i'm almost done again no pressing because i'm just worried about this seam on this side right here right sides together sew all the way down [Music] whenever you're starting and stopping like this it's always best to stop with the needle in the down position just so that things don't shift very much when you're stopping and tugging on things and getting ready to start sewing again [Music] and it's oddly even though i wasn't trying this one didn't twist at all so and if it does twist it doesn't matter you're just going to cut that off i'm going to go ahead and just cut it off now because i think it'll be easier okay so here we are we're at the bottom and we are at we're 16 wide and now the last thing is to do one last seam bringing this over [Music] okay so normally when you're doing your jelly roll and you're doing 42 strips 1600 inches by the time you flip it over and you sew those end to end five times you end up with a quilt that's approximately 50 inches wide by about 60 inches long mine does not seem to be that big i look like i'm probably at about maybe 40 inches so my guess is that the jelly roll or the bits that i was using i probably must have started with i don't know maybe about 30 strips it was hard to know because i had a lot of leftover pieces inside a lot of short pieces so there isn't any real clear-cut math except for the length that you start with if you know that you want a quilt that's going to fit a specific bed just start with a lot of strips start with a couple of jelly rolls it's not that you can't put a border on something like this but um anyway so we'll get this last seam done and then what i'm going to do is press it after i press it i'm going to trim the edges [Music] okay that was my last one i'm going to go ahead and just cut with scissors because i have to iron it that's it that's my jelly roll race 1600 or in this case oh i might have started with about 1200 but anyway i'm gonna press it up square it up and i'll show you a finished picture thank you for watching our video we invite you to leave a comment hit the like button or better yet subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode you can also visit our instagram twitter facebook or pinterest pages or find all of those things and our online store at fabricpatch.net

Channel: The Fabric Patch

Views: 145,706

Rating: 4.8733253 out of 5

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Id: oYK-tSrwueQ

Length: 33min 47sec (2027 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020