Jelly Rolls Session 1: Intro: Working with Jelly Rolls

Welcome to the Joy of Jelly Rolls. If you've never played with a jelly roll before this is the video for you. Today I'm going to be telling you all about jelly rolls. What is a jelly roll? What are the advantages to a jelly roll?

How do you use them? Why do you even want to buy them? They're a lot of fun. They're convenient and they are certainly addicting. So I want to make sure that you know exactly how to use these wonderful fabric options.

I want to make sure that you know how to make some easy blocks from them and then how to put those blocks into a beautiful settings for a gorgeous quilt. And I want to save you a lot of time since these are time-saving quilting options. I want to show you some tips and tricks to make sure that you are using them in the most efficient way possible. And then I want you to make sure you've got a jelly roll handy because we are gonna do a bonus project at the end that's a scrappy little baby quilt, or you can make it with a different kind of fabric and have a very lovely throw that I think you'll enjoy. And it is going to be a lot of fun.

So sit back and relax. And you don't have to take notes. A lot of the information will be available on PDFs or you can, of course always go back and review any segment that you wish. And I think that you'll find that this is going to be a very fun and eye-opening video. First off, in this segment is what I call the jelly roll primer.

And this is where we learn exactly what is a jelly roll? Well, it's a roll of fabrics and they consists of 2 1/2 inch wide strips by the width of the fabric, which is typically oh, 42 inches wide. And they were first introduced at the Quilt Market in Houston by Moda, and once they hit the market, people went crazy for them. And now you can find a jelly roll by just about any manufacturer that's out there. They usually have 40 to 42 strips in them.

Although I have seen some the other day at Joann's, I saw I guess, what you would call a mini jelly roll. It had 18 strips in it. So you really want to read your label and make sure you know how many strips you're actually getting. It's the equivalent of about 2 1/2 yards fabric. And it is usually from a coordinated fabric line or a series of fillers and blenders like you see here.

They come in just about any type of fabric you can imagine. Juvenile prints, Christmas prints, dog prints, sports themes, reproduction fabrics, tone on tone fabrics, you name it, there's a jelly roll for it. You'll even find batik jelly rolls that are a lot of fun to work with. So what are the advantages of buying a jelly roll as opposed to let's say a fat quarter or even yardage? Well, first of all, it saves you some money.

You can sample fabrics from a manufacturer's fabric line without investing a lot of money and you can also use them as fillers for a quilt. You don't necessarily have to make the quilt completely from a jelly roll. For instance, this one is nice that you can use just when you need a little pop of color in a quilt and you don't have to buy a lot of yardage. You can just have this on hand for a filler for your quilt. They're very versatile.

You can use jelly rolls alone and make a whole quilt out of a jelly roll or several jelly rolls or you can pair them with other fabric options. Jelly rolls play very, very well with pre-cuts, which are other fabrics that have been computer cut or laser cut to precise sizes. You have charm packs, which are five inch squares, you have your layer cakes, which I believe are the 10 1/2 squares, you have honey buns, which are not as wide as a jelly roll. They're about an inch and a half, I believe. So they play well with all of the pre-cuts.

They play very well with fat quarters, with yardage, with whatever you have in your stash. In fact, I highly encourage people when they're making a quilt from just a jelly roll, to throw in a few pieces from their stash to pop the quilt so that it doesn't have all the same tone to it. Manufacturers tend to use a certain tone of dyes and while they're very pretty and they blend in coordinate absolutely perfectly, sometimes they can be a little too much sameness and a nice pop of fabric from a different manufacturer can make all the difference in the world. I also tell people that if they will cut the strip in half as you can see, it's the full width of the fabric. If you cut it in half so that it's now 21 inches wide versus the 42 inches wide, if you have fat quarters or cut strips from your fat quarters then the half strips will match up perfectly.

And you can make mini strips, which are actually easier to sew than the long ones. And we'll talk about that in the segment called strip piecing. The other thing about jelly rolls is they're perfect if you're going to a quilting retreat or to a class. They're very, very compact. So they store easily and they're easy to tote.

You just throw it in your bag and you're ready to go. The most important thing with a jelly roll though, excuse me, is that it is perfectly cut. They're accurately cut to two and a half inches. So you don't have to worry about your strip being off or being a little bit crooked. It is perfect 2 1/2 inches all the way down.

And because of this, it's going to save you a lot of time. You don't have to do all the prep of cutting strips before you cut out the individual segments or patches for your quilt. So it eliminates that tedious strip cutting. I find that because of that, a jelly roll is perfect for a new quilter when they're just starting to learn how to use the rotary cutter and manipulate the ruler. If you're just having to cut smaller pieces if you're only cutting across the strip it's a lot easier to start getting used to the feel of the rotary cutter.

The strips are perfect for children and teaching children to quilt. I did a class not too long ago with a group of children and we had just a ton of cut strips in the right sizes. And we put them out and the kids got to go pick their own strips. They had to go one at a time and pick a strip and then the next person would go and it made it very fun for the kids and it made it so that each quilt was unique to that child rather than everybody's quilt looking alike. And that was probably the hit of the class was picking out their strips.

So there's a lot of good reasons for using a jelly roll, but again the main reasons are they're a huge time saver and they are accurately cut and they're just plain fun. So how do you use a jelly roll? Well, what you need to know is that the 2 1/2 inch strip is a very common measurement in quilting. And so when you sew your strip or when you sew a square or rectangle or your patch it will finish at two inches wide. So go ahead and use these just like any other 2 1/2 inch strip that you've cut yourself.

These are perfect for scrappy quilts because as you can see, it depends on the manufacturer. But for instance, in this Kaufman jelly roll they gave you two strips of each color. And this one, it looks like the same, Kaufman went with two strips of each color. The one that I got from Joanne's that was the mini one actually had three strips of each color. So you will find that these are perfect for scrappy quilts.

The more that you cut them and just intermingle them, the better. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about that when we get into our designing and also when we get to our bonus project. One roll will typically make a baby or a lap quilt. You can count on somewhere in the neighborhood of about 48 by 60 inch quilt at the max. Two rolls, put them together and you can easily make a twin quilt, it will finish somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 by 80 inches and that's if you're using strictly a jelly roll.

If you pair in other fabrics, obviously you can make larger quilts or stretch the jelly roll further, or if you want to do larger than a twin, then you're gonna have to pick up more jelly rolls. I like to make my own jelly rolls and I'll show you how to do that. It's really quite simple. Just take your fabric and put your ruler down, make sure you're nice and straight. That's very important is that everything is nice and straight.

So what I like to do is I line up the fold, the fabric on one horizontal line on my cutting mat. And then I like to match up my ruler to that same line to make sure that I'm perfectly square and then line up my vertical line. So now that I know that I'm going to have a perfectly squared piece and then just go ahead and cut all the way across. I highly recommend when you're making your own that you, especially if you're gonna do a number of strips, have a new blade in so that you don't have problems with it not cutting all the way through or snagging your fabric. So after you get your initial cut there, you're going to come back, line up your ruler once again at the horizontal line and across, and we're gonna go 2 1/2 inches.

And I always come back and double count just to make sure one, two, and a half. Cut the next strip. And then we are going to be able to get one more out of here, yay. So I'm gonna get two strips. And just like that, I'm on my way to having a jelly roll.

Once you have your strips, you can go ahead and sort them according to fabric theme, according to color, according to value, you may want to have your light, mediums and darks done in either together or in separate jelly rolls. When you finish cutting them, you can either roll them up and make your own with just tie it together, and it stores nice and neatly. And in fact, these need to go in here. Or you can go ahead and just pin them as I've done here. And these I sorted by color and they are going to go into, I have wire baskets, and so they sit in there like this and I can easily grab them and they're ready to go.

Now you may notice that some of these are shorter or even in small blocks, they aren't the official 42 inch width strip, that's because when I worked at Quilter's Newsletter for several years, we would oftentimes get these fabric swatches from the manufacturer so we could see the new fabrics that were coming out for the year. And as you can see, they're in all different sizes. So I couldn't necessarily get a full cut for 42 inches but I would take them home. And typically as soon as I got home, I would just go ahead and strip them so that they were all ready to go. It's a really great stash buster when you have small pieces of fabric.

I used to cut, as soon as a project was finished, I would take my remaining fabric and go ahead and cut it into strips and pin them and have them ready to go. Anytime the project was ended, it was just a nice way to clean up the sewing room. And rather than just stuffing it away and not dealing with it, I'd take care of it right then. And it just took a few minutes. Otherwise you can have quite a project when you decide to go in and take care of your stash.

You could be several days cutting strips. So I recommend just cut a few strips a day, maybe just a certain color or a certain fabric theme. Invite a friend over, cut together and swap, take home, let her take home half of yours and you keep half of hers. Organize a guild strip swap. That's that's a wonderful way to really get some variety for your homemade jelly rolls and to get to see some new fabrics.

If you have a fat quarter that you're gonna be cutting up, like I said, go ahead and cut your strips from your other jelly rolls in half so that you can, can make half roll jelly rolls. That works out very well. If you have yardage where you've got full cuts of the fabric, rather than a fat quarter you can get approximately three strips out of a quarter yard. So that'll give you a good feel, especially if you decide you just want to go into the store and buy yardage for making your own jelly roll. If you get quarter yard cuts, you'll be just fine.

And you'll actually, with a half a dozen different fabrics you'll be well on your way to having a good jelly roll made. So jelly rolls are fun. They're fast, they're easy to use, but I'm gonna give you a fair warning, they're very addictive.