National Sew a Jelly Roll Day

Today I am so excited to be joining the Fat Quarter Shop & Moda Fabrics for Project Jelly Roll: National Sew a Jelly Roll Day! To be honest, I was not sure what to expect when I signed up to be a part of the FQS blogging team, but it has proven to be loads of fun! Fat Quarter Shop is actually the very first online shop where I purchased quilting fabric way back in 2010! That project was not my best, I didn’t have any idea with a 1/4″ seam was at that point in time😉, but it sparked a love of quilting that has not slowed down.

The pattern I made to celebrate NSAJRD is the Jelly Roll Railway quilt, a FREE pattern from Fat Quarter Shop! For my fabrics I combined a jelly roll of Just a Speck by Jen Kingwell with Moda Bella solids in grey and white. I decided to leave off the borders that the pattern calls for to give the quilt a more modern feel.

I dragged my husband out to these abandoned train tracks in our neighborhood for pictures because a the Jelly Roll Railway quilt obviously needs to be photographed by railroad tracks! One of my favorite parts of this quilt is the secondary pattern created because I chose background and accent fabrics with high contrast.

I even had a bit of fun with the binding. Since there were scraps left over from the strip piecing of the blocks, I was able to cut them into even narrower strips and sew them together for a section of the binding. I love the fun pop of color it adds to the edge of the quilt.

For my quilting I used a whopping 12 different colors of Aurifil 50 weight thread. I used so many because I matched the thread color to each of the different fabrics. It required a lot of thread changes but in the end it was totally worth it!

I recently took a workshop with Christa Watson, and so I tried a couple new to me quilting techniques from that class on this quilt! If you follow me on Instagram, then you probably saw my stories of testing out the loopy”L’s” that I stitched in the grey sections. The first few were pretty wonky, but once I got the hang of it they looked much better! Plus, if you use a thread that matches your background fabric, then you’ll be the only one to notice. 😉

From Left to Right I used color numbers: #2730, #2620, #2530, #2214, #2600, #2021, #5006, #2920, #2710, #2423, #2235, and #2535.

I had so much fun making this quilt! Be sure to check out the Fat Quarter Shop for all of their other amazing Jelly Roll tutorials!