My 1890 quilt

Let me first explain the name… most people use a jelly roll, 40 strips at about 40 inches per strip equals 1600 inches which is why this design is often called the 1600 quilt.  Well… mine was a little jelly roll of only 20 black strips, plus 7 black strips left over from another similar jelly roll plus 18 red strips left over from another project.  So that’s 20 plus 7 plus 18 which equals 1880, plus ten inches left over from the border on that other project which adds up to 1890 which is what I’m calling this quilt. 

Yes, I swore I would never make one.  Yes I said I would never use jelly rolls.  All of a sudden I’m doing a lot of things I said I would never do… like angry birds but that’s another story. 

So I made a project I am not showing yet with black and red strips, some from jelly rolls, some cut from my red stash.  I decided to use the left over strips to make a 1600 quilt.  I sewed all the strips together like I was making a very very long long binding strip, diagonally. 

A friend calls me, and I can hear her sewing in the background.  I teased her about sewing while on the phone, and she said that if I was at my machine I could sew too.  I told her I was, put her on speaker and went on sewing.  She told me about her project, a twin Sailing Ships quilt for her grandson and then asked me what I was working on.

Believe it or not, she’d never heard of a 1600 quilt or jelly roll quilt so I had to explain it to her.  I said you sew all the strips together with diagonal seams like you were making a very very long long binding strip, then you sew that very very long long strip together into a strip set of two…  and I picked up two strips and sewed them together length wise… by time I realized what I was doing I was almost to the end, and we both had a very good laugh over it.  And I stopped sewing while talking to her so I could concentrate and not make any more mistakes. 

After my call ended I had to figure out what to do with that booboo… I didn’t want to unsew it, so I decided to use it as a 2 1/2 alternating strip…  and that’s what I did.  I cut the two wrongly joined strips into 2 1/2 inch segments and sewed half of them together into one strip and added that to the long strip I was making. Then a little while later on that same long strip I added the other half of the alternating strip.  No, I didn’t take a picture but you can figure that out on your own. 

Then I started to sew that one very very long long strip into a shorter strip of two… I ran into this… anyone care to explain how that happened? 

I took out a small seam and untied the knot and re-sewed the seam and continued on.  I sewed the one very very long long strip into a slightly shorter strip of two, then that into a strip of four and then that into a strip of eight and then 16 and I think I stopped at 32. 

And this is what I got.  It needs borders, but I can guarantee you they won’t be 2 1/2 inches!