How to Quilt a Jelly Roll Race Quilt with Deborah Louie

Deborah Louie shares her domestic quilting advice on how to Quilt a Jelly Roll race Quilt.

Dear Deborah,
I have made this jelly-roll quilt (160cm x 185cm) for my son, then I sandwiched it but I don’t know how to quilt it. I would love your advice on how I should be quilting this design.
Thank you very much,
Dale

Our Soaring Eagles Quilt is perfect for jelly roll!

Hi Dale, Thanks for the email. This quilt is a great easy design for a teenager who loves music. Terrific choice — lucky young man! I thought I would quickly make a jelly-roll race quilt to demonstrate the steps involved and give you some quilting inspiration.

My jelly roll was a 3 Sisters range from Moda. Just like you, I pieced the jelly roll in strips using a ¼in seam allowance. It’s in the jelly-roll race style, which is joining the strips just as they come off the roll, end-to-end, using a diagonal seam. Find the two ends of the strip and join them right sides together (folding the strip in half on top of itself), then sew down the full length of the doubled-over strip.

Repeat this by opening out the two ends, joining them right sides together and then sewing down the full length of the doubled-over strip. Keep repeating to complete the top. This only took an hour or so.

I then ironed all the seams in one direction. This makes ditching a breeze. The last process was pinning the quilt with a suitable backing fabric together with Matilda’s Own 100 percent polyester batting.

Now, to the quilting. As I have mentioned numerous times in these columns, I ditch all straight seams (see Photo 1).

Ditching is when you stitch as close as you can on the seam side that is low and the high side has the seam ironed to that direction. We don’t want the stitches to fall on the high side.

On the low side, the stitches drop into the seam gully and when stitched well, will be invisible. All of this is done with the walking foot on the machine. Start with about 6–8 tiny stitches on a stitch length of 0.50–1.0 depending on your machine.

Then increase your length to around 4.0. The longer the stitch and the slower you quilt, the flatter your quilt will be. It is very important to make sure you do not hold the quilt back, as this will result in smaller stitches. You also don’t want to push the quilt under the walking foot — let the walking foot do the job. Nice and slow and accurate.

Use 100 percent black cotton thread in the top of your machine and in your bobbin. Refer to Diagram 1 for the direction to quilt and Photo 2 to see the quilting in the ditch.

Once the ditching was completed, it was nice but lacked something. So here is a bit of fun if you’re up for it. Why not now free-motion appliqué some musical notes, circles and treble clefs onto the surface over the strips? These would look great in grey fabric all over the quilt, or black shapes on the red half and red shapes on the black half perhaps.

I suggest you take a scan of your fabric to see the shapes and then enlarge the individual shapes you like. Outline them on a new sheet of paper, then draw these shapes as many times as you think would look good on your fusible web. Roughly cut ½in away from the drawn line.

Take your choice of fabric for the notes and iron the shapes onto the wrong side of the fabrics. Cut the shapes out on the line. Lay the quilt flat and randomly scatter your shapes all over the quilt. Remove the backing paper and iron them into position. Have fun placing the shapes in all directions over your quilt.

I have copied some flowers from the prints in my jelly-roll fabric. I raided my fabric stash to find fabrics in colours similar to those in the prints, then I drew large flowers and a medium-size daisy with some ornamental leaves and a standard leaf shape. I randomly placed the flowers on the quilt and ironed them all into place once I was happy with the configuration (see Photo 3).

Practice jelly roll with our range of quilts, including the Patches and Triangles Quilt!

lt at the same time is the raw-edge free-motion style. Attach a free-motion foot or darning foot to your machine and drop the feed dogs. Take your stitch length down to 0. Starting at a junction where two shapes meet, draw up the bobbin thread and move the fabric just a little to get close stitches to start off.

Move the fabric smoothly to follow the edge of the shapes. I simply stitched approximately 2mm (1/8in) away from the edge of the fabric in a light-beige 100 percent cotton thread on all the shapes.

I started on the outside of the flowers and worked my way into the centre. Occasionally I stitched a little detail inside a flower or added veins to the leaves, but not on all of them. I then stitched a leaf on the background too. I took a casual approach to the appliquéing (see Photo 4).

The Applique Spring Song Quilt is easy to make with pre-cut fabric strips from a jelly roll or similar!

Only one line was needed so you don’t catch the edge inside the shape. It will fray a little when washed, adding to the relaxed technique. Remember, this is a quick quilt to piece and machine quilt on your own machine.
I’m happy with the result on my quilt and hope you give this a try, Dale. Happy quilting!

Visit Deborah Louis’ website here.