Renewed Jelly Roll Race Progress

Jelly Roll Diamonds
Jelly Roll Diamonds

After cutting what seemed like a zillion diamonds last week, the picture(left) is what resulted. There are a lot of diamonds. As I mentioned, about 158. It would be nice if that left corner was filled  with diamonds as well. I know I can’t have everything, though, and I am not about to sew another Jelly Roll Race top!

DH figured out how many I will need to make a quilt top as well as the layout. YAY! So glad I married someone who can do math. I was thinking of putting the question (whether there is a formula for laying out diamond quilts) to The Young Man’s Geometry teacher, but haven’t yet.

Leftover from Jelly Roll Race strips
Leftover from Jelly Roll Race strips

The only scrap of any size at the end, aside from shards, was the weird wonky shape I show on my cutting mat.

I was ready to move forward and just toss the scraps when it occurred to me that I could piece together the scraps, mosaic quilting style, and make a few more diamonds. I might need them. I might not need them. You never know.  The scraps might just be fun to sew together or I could make some cool do Donation blocks. A little too wild? Look for more on that.

Jelly Roll Diamonds
Jelly Roll Diamonds

Saturday, I flailed around. DH and I went around a few times about the number of rows and columns. His first calculations rendered a verdict of  10 rows by 9 columns (remember that the second and every other row would have 9 rows and 8 columns), which left me with a really long skinny piece, though I wasn’t sure HOW long or HOW skinny, because I hadn’t put sashing on yet. I was also sick (yes, again!) and tried to take it easy. I don’t feel like I really accomplished much on Saturday, but it was required for the process, I think.

Sunday Work
Sunday Work

Sunday went much better. I didn’t have a headache, which was a bonus. The corner is the hardest part to figure out and the fact that I was adding sashing added to the trickiness. I bought a 1.5″ strip cutting die for my Go! cutter and cut 1.5″ strips from the Pure Elements linen I had. Good thing, because I have a lot of it and used up about 1.5 yards so far. Julie of Intrepid Thread will be getting some business from me to replace that fabric. I need it for the A-B-C Challenge.

The photo, left, shows sections of the quilt sewn together. It is going much more smoothly after getting the weird shapes on the right hand side mostly finished. I was sorely tempted just to sew the thing together in long rows across the piece from right to left, but know I would be hating myself midway through, thus the chunks.

Sashing on diamonds
Sashing on diamonds

And for those of you who are curious about the sashing, I put it on to many diamonds at once. Cutting the strips with the Go! Cutter really made my life easier. I cut 5 strips at a time and then sewed as many diamonds as I could to each strip. It isn’t that I can’t cut strips; of course I can. The Go! Cutter just made my life a lot easier.

Once I had strips of sashing, I lined up the first diamond, folding back the sashing to make sure I had placed the diamond low enough on the strip so that the sashing would fill the entire angle.Then I sewed, one after another as close together as possible so I would waste as little background fabric as possible.

[BTW, that is my hideous ironing board cover. If any of you have a store nearby that carries Polder ironing board covers with a grid pattern, leave a comment or let me know. This one I got off Amazon and it is too thick aside from being not my color. I will be your new best friend if we can work out some sort of arrangement for you to get me one.]

Right Corner detail
Right Corner detail

As usual, I wanted to get a lot farther along. I am past the flailing point; I am past the figuring point and now I am just matching seams and rearranging diamonds. I’d like to be done with this project. I will finish it, but I am so ready to move on. No more Jelly Roll Races for me!

 

Author: Jaye

Quiltmaker who enjoys writing and frozen chocolate covered bananas.

4 thoughts on “Renewed Jelly Roll Race Progress”

  1. Hi Jaye,
    To make a “rectangle” of diamonds with R rows and C columns where R is the count of diamonds on the outer left edge and C is the count of diamonds across the top:
    (R*C) + ((R-1)*(C-1)) = total # diamonds.

    To take some number n of diamonds and try to figure out how many rows and columns are needed to use most of them is a different problem. I haven’t figured that one out yet. 🙂

  2. if you have n diamonds (total number of diamonds) to get R and C pick an R or C, put it in Reva’s equation and solve for C or R as needed. unfortunately, most of the time you will not get an integer as an answer. For example, if you have 21 diamonds and you want 3 columns then you get 4 rows and three diamonds left over. 18 diamonds also makes 3 rows and 4 columns.

  3. HI Jaye, having just created my first (and probably last) jelly roll race, I had some hope with seeing your quilt. Could you share how you cut your diamonds? Hoping I can turn my ‘troll’ of a jelly roll race into a swan. TIA

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