What Are Pre-Cut Fabrics?

I love to quilt. I really love to quilt, but, boy, I hate cutting all the fabric. First, you have to press it, you have to open it up. You have to square it up, get it nice and ready to go. Then you start cutting your 2.5 inch strips or whatever you're gonna do. It takes time to count them all. And then after you cut your strips, now you have to start cutting your patches. And all I wanted to do was start sewing and quilting. If that's the case, you're probably ready for pre-cuts. What are pre-cuts? They're an ingenious time saving invention by our fabric manufacturers. This is a roll of strips, just like what I cut, 2.5 inches wide by the width of the fabric. So technically 42 inches, but count on 40 usable inches. In a jelly roll, a wonderful name for this because of the way it spirals, jelly rolls typically have 40 strips, 2.5 inches wide by 40 inches long. And there's approximately three yards of fabric in here. So it's already cut. It's already done. And typically they are from a collection, very similar to when you buy a pack of fat quarters that are already put together for you. So your strips are already cut, which saves you a lot of time. And now you can simply either piece the strips together, depending on your quilt, or you can cut them into the patches, just like you would with this strip that you cut yourself. That's a jelly roll. To make life even easier, the manufacturers have come out with what they call a layer cake. I love these names. So a layer cake is a group of fabrics layered, hence the term layer cake, that are 10 inches square. And typically in a layer cake, you will get 42 squares. Again, that's real close to three yards of fabric. It's about 100 inches linear of fabric when you lay them end to end, and you get 10 inch by 10 inch squares. After the layer cake, we're not done yet, you get a charm pack. A charm pack, and here's one in flannel, charm packs are typically five inch squares, five inch by five inch. And in a charm pack, once again, you get 42 different fabrics from a collection. So it's already coordinated for you. You can use them alone, you can use them in conjunction with each other, or you can start throwing in other fabrics to compliment and coordinate with them for your borders and your sashing, or also within the blocks. One more piece that's available that I didn't bring today is the mini charm. And those consist of 2.5 by 2.5 inch squares. Typically, there's 42 of those to a package. It equates to just under 1/4 of a yard of fabric, and the charm packs equate to approximately 2/3 of a yard of fabric. So you can keep that in mind as you're looking at your quilting patterns. There are lots of books, this is just one that I brought today, that discuss how to quilt with charm packs, jelly rolls, and how to combine them together. They all play wonderfully well together in your quilting room. And this is just a cute little book. It tells you primarily what is being used, how to use them. These are for layer cakes. You come back there's jelly roll, even fat quarters, they'll throw those in the mix. They all play well and they all literally are a bundle of fun to do. And so, check out the different books that are available. And just to show you an example of how much fun they are, this was a little quilt that I put together a while back, and I just had fun with it because I just was able to take my jelly roll and start cutting my pattern pieces to do my square in a square blocks. And then I did some log cabin blocks, I did a piano border which was cut out lickety-split with the leftovers, added a little bit of sashing and some accent pieces, and I'm ready to go. I could add another border here, I can leave it like this. And I saved literally several hours of cutting by using pre-cuts. So I hope you'll discover the joy of pre-cuts.