Quick Jelly Roll Quilt Tutorial

I am writing up a quick Jelly Roll Quilt tutorial for you all today because I made a quilt on Saturday for my daughter. I am not a seamstress, or have ever made a quilt before. If I can do this… you can do this!! And you can probably do it a LOT better than me. But as I was posting the progress on Instagram people were asking for instructions, so I wanted to write some up. I am sure there are faster and better ways to do things, please fell free to share your tips!

This is a tutorial for a quick Jelly Roll Quilt or also called strip quilt that I am making for my daughters birthday. I went to Joann’s fabric to pick up some velcro with my littlest the other day. As we walked by the quilters bundles one pack caught her eye and she asked to carry it around the store with her, which was fine by me to keep her busy so I could browse.

She kept asking for a quilt, so I let her buy the bundle. We got 2 bundles, they were each 40% off. One bundle was a pattern and one was the bright pinks. Each bundle had 6 squares of fabric in them.

When I got home I washed and ironed the squares. Because it was cotton it would have shrunk after it was sewn and washed so you want to wash the fabric before hand.

Then I used a rotary tool and mat to cut the fabric into 2.5 inch strips. The set I have is actually on sale HERE. It goes really fast to cut them out this way.

Once I had all the squares cut out into 2.5 inch strips, I had 6 different color strips. I matched them up into pairs and pinned them face side together.

With the front or face sides together I sewed each strip down one side the long way. I just kept sewing them strip after strip and not stopping to cut the thread. This saved a lot of time and I could go really fast.

This gave me a huge pile of my strips all sewn together like a long snake. Then I just snipped them apart.

Once they were snipped apart, I took 2 different sections and placed them face to face (or front side to front side) and sewed them together along the long side, almost just like I had done before.

You can see them face to face as I am sewing them together below.

 

As I am going along, my sections are getting bigger and bigger and I am also not stopping to cut the thread in-between each section, I am just continuing to feed the pieces through, picking up the foot a little to slide the next piece in. This is saving me a lot of time and thread.

Now, I have ended up with some bigger sections once all the strips are sewn together. To this point I have spent about 1.5 hours cutting, seeing and ironing.

I am going to press these sections nice and flat and then I am going to start cutting them into smaller sections for the quilt.

Tomorrow, I will post the next section so that this post isn’t a mile long. But it went very fast to this point as far as making the sections.

Go HERE for the 2nd part of the tutorial.