Strip Sets for the Win! / Beauties Pageant 286

This post features projects from my upcoming book Not-Your-Typical Jelly Roll Quilts!

You’ve heard me waxing on about jelly rolls, and you may be wondering why I’m not compelled to work with a different precut, like layer cakes. I love a good layer cake, and a few of the patterns in my book can probably even be made with a layer cake’s 10-inch squares instead of a jelly roll’s 2.5-inch strips. But there’s one thing a jelly roll can do that no layer cake can, and that is produce big, time-saving strip sets.

You’ve likely made strips sets for other patterns. It’s the process of sewing jelly roll strips together along the long edges and then cutting the resulting set into smaller units to resew in different configurations. When I’m working with jelly rolls, I leverage the power of strip sets whenever I can—it’s simply a more efficient way to sew. 

Two quilts from my book that employ this technique are Butterfly Season and Myriad ...

Butterfly Season

Quilts take a long time to make, so I take advantage of every shortcut I can. In Butterfly Season, that means strip piecing the wings of each butterfly and strip-piecing the butterflies’ bodies. 

Plus, setting the time-saving benefits aside, there’s something super satisfying about sewing together these strips and then cutting crisp, pristine units from them.

Butterfly Season requires a full jelly roll and produces a twin-size quilt.

Jelly roll: Beautiful Day by Corey Yoder for Moda

Background fabric: Moda Bella Solids in Off-White

Batting: Warm and White

Finished size: 77.5" x 90.5"

Pieced by Michelle Cain; quilted by Ophelia Chang 

Myriad

Strip sets are the foundation of Myriad, a generously sized throw quilt that I sewed with a line of Kate Spain batiks. 

Again, relying on the strip-set technique here makes the quilt-making process go faster. It also produces less waste than if the pieces were sewn into rectangles and then cut into the necessary half-hexagons.

Myriad may look difficult, but in the end, it requires sewing columns of equilateral triangles together. Easy peasy!

Jelly roll: Confection Batiks by Kate Spain for Moda

Background fabric: Moda Bella Solids in White

Batting: Warm and White

Finished size: 64.5" x 83.75"

Pieced by Michelle Cain; quilted by Ophelia Chang 

You can preorder my book here!

 

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