Jelly Rolls

Ok, I know I don’t need to be starting ANOTHER project, but I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this jelly roll I bought a while ago. I’ve looked at many, many books and just haven’t found a pattern that I liked. I was thinking about it while I was out today, because I was listening to a podcast and she was talking about heart themed projects for Valentine’s Day. I’ve FINALLY decided on the project! I’m going to cut these strips into tumbler shapes and put it all together randomly. The blocks will use the full 2.5″ height so I should be able to use just about everything in the jelly roll. I have a template, but it’s for 2″ tumblers which was just too small. Below is the EQ drawing – no, it’s not colored correctly!

So anyway, now that I decided what I was going to do, I needed to figure out how big this was going to end up being and figure out the layout – how many rows and how many in each row? Off to EQ to try and figure it out! But I needed to know how much yardage there was in the jelly roll to make sure I was making it a realistic size. I could not find the yardage ANYWHERE on the web! So I finally decided to calculate it out myself! I know there is 36″ in a yard and these are 2.5″ strips. You can fit 14.4 strips in a yard of fabric. Most jelly rolls are 40 strips of fabric, so I can figure that there’s about 2.75 yards in my jelly roll. This made it easy for me to determine the right layout in EQ since it tells me how many yards of the fabric I need! The center of the quilt is 42 x 32 and I need 528 tumblers to make this quilt. Now to cut them all out!!!

The good news is that I also have a tub FULL of 2.5″ strips cut from old projects that I can make a totally scrappy one too! But first to use the jelly roll!!!!