Thursday, September 25, 2014

Obnoxious Blankets


 I made two more obnoxious jelly roll blankets.  I used up the last of my scrub top scraps for this one and backed it with a busy zig zag print.  I cut all my scraps 3 inches wide and used a 1/2" seam allowance and was never pleased with the finished width of the blanket.  When you sew the blanket using this method, you go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 strips wide.  64 strips would be way to wide so I made the next one cutting the strips 3.5 inches wide to stretch my 32 strips.
 I lay out my backing fabric on the living room floor right side down, then my batting and then the quilt top right side up.  I smooth it out as best I can and then pin it to death.  I quilt the layers together using the strips as a guide which goes much faster than my plain fabric blankets because I don't have to measure and chalk lines.  Then I trim the batting and quilt top and fold over and hem the backing edges because I don't have the patience to mess around with quilt binding.  And it seems whenever I do this, someone always has to come along and lay on the quilt. 

 Here is the other one I finished!  A while back, I collected a bunch of holly fabrics for Christmas and planned someday for a Christmas quilt.  Of course they sat in a box in my sewing room and got moved up here from Iowa and then moved here from our old apartment.  Ever since I started working on jelly roll quilts, stash is starting to bite the dust!  I have batting on hand for 2 more but I have at least 4 groups of fabric stash mentally lined up. 

Winter is coming and you can never have too many blankets in your house for company.  We had 8 people stay with us last weekend and luckily the weather was warm.  I use our living room floor to assemble the quilts so for that reason I'm a little glad we still don't have furniture in it!
 Our Better Boy tomatoes have really slowed down but we have plenty of Juliets that are ripening.  I've been picking a lot of green tomatoes...
 ...and eating them like this!  Dip them in flour with some Greek seasoning, then egg, and then cornmeal and fry until the tomatoes are tender.  Num num!  I have 4 eggplants developing and I can't wait!

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