Let's make a quilt....or three!

Time to do some actual work with the new machine and a few of the Houston goodies, so we're going to use the Eleanor Burns Twice as Nice... Plus More pattern and ruler set. (If you can zoom in, you'll see that Eleanor signed the upper right corner of the pattern). I had the jelly roll and there are also a couple of charm packs in case I want to add in a little something to upsize.

The jelly roll and a little background fabric will make a 52x64, 42x42 and a 37x45 quilt. I may just consolidate the various blocks into a single, or I may combine them to make 2 gifts.

I'm  using Moda's The Caroler by Mary Engelbreit.

If you've got a jelly roll and a 9-1/2" triangle square up ruler (or just a square up ruler that you've turned on point and taped a thin strip of painters tape across the middle from corner to corner, feel free to jump in.

First, we want to select 36 strips and lay them out in three rows of 12. We want to have the same number of each color in every row, where we can. At this point we aren't worried about pattern, just about separating out our colors so that each row has some green, some red, some black, and it's equally distributed.

Once we've got an even distribution we want to arrange our three rows so that no two colors are lying next to each other, and no to patterns are side by side. Take the strip from the middle row and lay it face down on the strip in the row on the left.

Stitch the two strips (right sides together) with a 1/4" seam.

Keep these in order. An easy way to do this is to stack them on top of each other as you've sewn the strips together. Then you'll press them open, and after pressing, taking the strip from the top, you'll stack them on top of each other again, and you'll be in the same order you were when you started, and you can now go back and sew the third strip on.

This is as far as we go tonight. Catch up if you want to sew with me and we'll continue tomorrow. If all goes as planned, the project will be completed by the end of the weekend.