A cousin is having a baby shower soon. I asked what the nursery colors were--green, gray, white, with a forest or mountain theme. Ooh--I had fabric for that!
I don't think that cousin follows this blog, but, just in case, I'm going to put the finished item under the cut
It's a quilt! An actual quilt, too, not just a patchwork top tufted to the backing.
...it's not complicated quilting, because I don't have the machine set up for that. I mean, I don't have the experience for that, either, but that wouldn't necessarily have stopped me from trying on a gift...
Another thing I lack, in terms of quilts, is a place to take lovely photos, so here it is in the living room, being held by the kiddo
As the title says, there were no jelly rolls involved in this. I had the forest print fabric and immediately thought of that. There was a yard, but the ends weren't exactly on grain, so I ended up with 13 strips of 2½" fabric, and I let that guide me to make 13 strips of the gray and white fabric, too.
I actually really like the idea of jelly roll race patchwork made from a very limited number of fabrics, but you don't see many of those when you poke the internet for examples of jelly roll races--well, I don't. I found one, once, then couldn't find it again. So, I was taking a chance on a three fabric version turning out the way I thought it would.
I also wasn't prepared for the fact that the speed of assembly, in the first stage when you're sewing all the strips into one long strip, relies on using prints and so knowing which side is up when you're ready to sew on the next strip. And I somehow flipped the angle of two of the ends? But it's fine. I wouldn't have minded if I'd flipped the angle more.
I quilted through all layers by attempting to stitch in the ditch
There were varying levels of success, due in large part to not taking care to make sure the seam allowances were all pressed in the same direction. Not saying it would have been perfect otherwise, but it would have helped.
The backing is the same fabric as the white, which was all originally a thrifted 100% cotton sheet, acquired specifically to use for a blanket backing at some unknown time.
The blue-gray tweedy? shot? cotton? was also thrifted, whatever it is. (I actually thrifted several yards of the same fabric in a coral color, too. Whatever it is.) [Edit, about two months later: I have just learned that it's probably something called kettle cloth, which fell so out of fashion that it hasn't been made for decades.] I decided I wanted to make the binding from bias, so the texture would contrast with the same fabric on the front. I used the continuous bias method to turn a half yard of the fabric into a lot more bias than I needed, which I ran through the Clover bias tape maker. I stitched it to the quilt back along the inside of one of the pressed folds, then flipped it around and edge stitched on the other fold, with no concern for where the stitching ended up on the back. It's not too bad.
(the fabric isn't pink tinted, that's from the grow light I keep in here for houseplants)
When everything was stitched, I washed and dried it in an effort to eliminate the holes from the basting pins and from the (surprisingly few) areas I had to pick out and sew again because of tucks on the back, and to fight off the cat hair. To that end, I bundled it into a plastic bag as soon as I got it out of the dryer and back upstairs. There are cat hairs visible inside, but not as many as there were before washing, at least.
I may make a properly scrappy jelly roll race blanket top sometime, just to use up some of the calicos crowding the doll cloth stash. As much as I like how a quilted blanket feels when it's finished, I did not at all enjoy wrestling the fabric sandwich through my machine, on my sewing table, so I will probably just add this hypothetical finished blanket top to the stash of all the other finished blanket tops. The finished quilt in this post, though, I'll be mailing to my cousin and her soon-to-be-expanded family.
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