Alyssa quilt: part 1

Everyday I get an email from the Missouri quilt company, showing their deal of the day.  A few weeks ago, the deal was a jelly roll line made by Moda, Miss Kate.  Of coarse it was designed by Bonnie and Camelle and so I had to look into it, them being some of my favorite designers. 

Guess what I did, I had to order it!  The colors and patterns are so much fun!

I also knew the perfect pattern to make this quilt into.  I drew up a pattern in July to make with Riley Blake, it's a Beautiful Thing line, and called it my 'Alyssa quilt' as it's for my daughter Alyssa.  This Miss Kate fabric and my Alyssa pattern, will make a fun baby quilt for an upcoming baby girl in my family.  

 (Like how I'm using my old scrapbooking paper to design quilts on?)

Supplies for Alyssa quilt:

1 Jelly Roll

Neutral Fabric (need 5" for every 5 blocks) Baby quilt: 2/3 yd, Twin quilt: 2 1/2  yds

Border fabric: Baby quilt:1/2 yd;Twin quilt 1 1/2 yds

Background fabric:  Baby quilt 1 1/2 yds; Twin 4 1/2-5 1/2 yds 

Binding: Baby 1/4 yd; Twin 1/2 yd

Sewing Maching

Aurifil Thread

Batting

You can get to part 2 here

Step 1: 

Sort your jelly roll fabric into groups of 4 fabric that will go together.  Try to mix your colors up so for example green won't be on the outside edge of each strip.

Step 2: 

Chain stitch each group of 4 together

One of my favorite tools it The Cutting Gizmo by www.thegypsyquilter.com, that I found at a local quilt store.  It's a great way to cut all those chained pieces apart quickly.

Step 3:

Iron hour strips, I prefer to iron all seams in one direction

Step 4:

Cut your pieced strips into 4 1/2" strips

  

Each combined strip of 4 jelly roll strips sewn together, will give you 9 block pieces to work with.

Step 5:

First, cut your neautral fabric into 2 1/2" strips, so that they will be fabric with @ 44" long by 2 1/2" wide.

Second cut those 44" x 2 1/2" strips into 8 1/2" long strips, one of these strips will make 5:  8 1/2" x 2 1/2" strips

I'm linking this to Needle and Thread Thursday and Let's BEE Social

Sneak Peak of Alyssa Quilt Part 2:

Baptist Fan

I'm working on a broken herringbone quilt that I started 13 months ago, with Molli Sparkles in a QAL.  Of coarse I set my vision to big and eventually decided to put the quilt on hold and just made this Christmas table runner.

Well, 13 months after starting this broken herringbone quilt,  I have finally finished the quilt top and am ready to put this quilt together.  

I have decided for this quilt I want to quilt a baptist fan pattern but I have never done this.  I know I'm a little crazy to quilt a pattern like this on a home machine, a 72"x85" quilt, and never having tried the pattern before.  

My first issue is I  don't have a circular template to create the fan.  I looked at my local quilting store and they have 1" half circle patterns.    I really want the fans to be farther apart than 1" but not so far as 2", meaning they won't work.  Many tutorials out there show how you can freehand your circle, but that does not work for me!  Other blogs show how some used lids or other circular shapes.... Not what I want.

I decided to create a template for me.  After digging around in my untouched scrapbooking closet I found some thin plastic and a hole punch.  

At first I thought I would want my fans quilting with circles 1 1/2" apart so I marked and punched my template ever 1 1/2".

After drawing the circles and seeing how far apart they looked, I re-marked (notice the black dots) my template at every 1 1/4".

Here is my sample drawings to see how big my fans will be.

Before I quilt anything I have to draw it!  If I can draw something on paper I can learn to quilt it on fabric,  if I can't draw on paper then I'm crazy to think I can make it quilt perfectly on fabric. It's not perfect, but it works and I found how I wanted my baptist fans quilted.  I will be quilting from right to left so I drew my fans from left to right.  Make sure you know the direction you will be quilting before you draw fans on your quilt!  

Next I practiced quilting on scrap fabric, but you aren't going to see how that turned out ;).

Next I marked my quilt's lower half and started quilting it using Arofill, 50wt light grey thread.

Here is where I am to.