Odori Quilt-Along

Hello and welcome to From Bolt to Beauty! If you’re new to these parts, I’m Michelle and I quilt a lot (like, more than I will ever admit to my husband).

I was so pleased to have the opportunity to work with the Fat Quarter Shop and Art Gallery Fabrics recently to sew my own Odori quilt, a free pattern and tutorial that uses a specialized ruler to make spider webs.

Here is my Odori, all quilted and bound and ready to be used. Beautiful, right?

For this project, I was allowed to choose any Art Gallery fabric I wanted. I love AG—the colors, the variety of designs, the super-soft hand—and it didn’t take me long to home in on Amy Sinibaldi’s Little Town collection. I have a weakness for Christmas fabric, and Little Town’s tiny houses and pine needles have a longer shelf life than other Christmas lines. Its palette contains gray-blues and pinks that, I think, will allow this quilt to be displayed and used from Thanksgiving through Valentine’s Day. I often gift the quilts I make, but I may have to keep this one for me (even though I just made a Christmas quilt for my family)!

I knew I wanted to use this print with the tiny houses, but I wasn’t sure
whether there was enough color in this design to use it in the spider webs or
whether it was low volume enough to use it as the background. Once I started
cutting and sewing my quilt top, I came to the conclusion that it would work well
either way.

The beauty of the Odori pattern is that it’s easier to assemble than it looks. Following the instructions, I sewed strip sets and used the Creative Grids Spider Web Ruler, provided to me by the Fat Quarter Shop, to cut my wedges. The process was gratifying and I had extra fabric, so even after I completed my six rows for a 50-inch square quilt, I kept sewing. I added two more rows for a rectangular quilt that measures 50 inches by 67 inches. (Note: If you want to supersize your Odori, buy the foreground prints as listed in the pattern and an additional half-yard of the background. Follow the instructions, saving the extra wedges and the ends of the strip sets for use in the two additional rows. You will also need to make an extra strip set with fabrics B, C, and D.)

I quilted this project with an all-over two-inch grid.

I think the hardest part of the assembly is getting the center points of each block right. Here is how I recommend doing it ...

1. First, place the two halves of a block right sides together, line up the center-most seam with pins, and sew a scant quarter-inch seam through just that intersection. (Don’t sew the entire length of the seam.)

2. Open up the block to see how the points line up. If you aren’t happy with it, unpick the stitches and try again.

3. If you like what you see, place the fabrics right sides together again, pin the other intersections (I like using a pin on either side of the matched-up seams), and sew the entire seam. Be sure to sew right over those initial trial stitches from step 1.

4. Open your block up and press.

Pretty nice, right? I have another example of this shortcut here.

To make your own Odori quilt, head to the Fat Quarter Shop’s Jolly Jabber blog for the free pattern and video tutorial. : )

Linking up to Let’s Bee Social and Needle and Thread Thursday ...