Jelly Rolls: Session 5: Endless Design Options

When it comes to design options, the possibilities are literally endless, you are only limited by your imagination. The same block can look entirely different if the setting changes. So have fun and give a lot of thought to that final quilt. The best thing to use is a design wall. The perspective is entirely different than when you lay your blocks out on the floor or on your bed. I cannot stress enough how different a quilt will look when you're looking at it face on rather than looking down on it. It's a lot easier to move the blocks around and you can really get a feel for what your quilt is going to look like as a finished product. It also will stay in place until it's sewn, which is nice so that you know which order to sew your blocks in and not get mixed up. I highly recommend though that you take photos as you work, and there's several reasons behind this. First of all, it's easy to forget what you like best. As you get playing with arrangements and moving blocks around, all of a sudden you realize, hmm, that's nice but I think I like the one three options ago and oh my gosh, now I can't remember what block went where and how do I get back there, so taking a photo will help you rearrange those blocks back to the option that you like best. It's also easy for blocks to fall off a design wall. I tend to usually put mine on and then put a straight pin through them, just to make sure that doesn't happen, especially once I've decided on a layout so that nothing happens when somebody walks past or brushes the wall. I don't want to lose my quilt. There's also the possibility that a family member will come in and literally rearrange your quilt 'cause they get an idea or think it would be fun and not realize that you didn't want them to touch it, so that's why I say take photos as you work. The design wall helps you really visualize your quilt and you can tell if you've done a good job of distributing the color evenly or if it's ending up, all the reds are ending up in the lower left corner, instead of maybe being balanced in opposite corners or in all the corners or in the middle. It just lets you play with it so that you can create contrast with the color and the print placement just as you did in the block, the individual block, now you can do it with all the blocks for the overall look with a quilt. I'd like to give you some tips and hints, and I brought a few books to kind of illustrate my points for different ways to create a modern look in your quilts. And this first book is called "One Bundle of Fun" by Sue Pfau, P-F-A-U, and this is a really, really nice little jelly roll book that I've enjoyed using as a reference. This particular quilt, let me move these over, I thought was very, very striking. It's very simple, it's a one-block quilt with strips that are serving as the sashing, just as a vertical sashing and then the blocks line up vertically. It's simple and it's bold, and I can see a lot of potential for this particular design with the different types of fabrics. I also thought it was interesting that she did her outer border to correspond with the sashing strips. So simple and bold is a modern look that you definitely want to go for. One-block quilts always are in style. They can be very, very modern. I like this one, it's a, it's called Sweet 16, and that's probably because it's a 16-block block, and it's a 16-patch, if you will, and this would look absolutely stellar in batik fabrics, and so this would be a wonderful setting, it's very simple, it's very clean, it's bold, but it uses a one-block quilt pattern that could easily, easily be strip pieced and I think you could have a lot of fun like as you see here, one, two, three, four blocks for instance, all of those strip pieced in two fabrics and then your other blocks, same type of thing. You could have a beautiful quilt and nothing flat. White is another exceptional way to bring out a modern, clean look in quilts. This one, she used white as the backdrop or the background fabric against a lot of bold colors and it's just very, very striking. And I'm seeing so much of the modern quilt movement where we're using blocks and bold geometric patterns with white as the background fabric. It's a clean, fresh, young look, it's replacing black right now, and so consider using white in your quilts. It also makes the quilt look a little bit larger. Another quilt that I particularly liked that had white in it that I thought was a good example of this, this book, by the way, it's called "Jelly Roll Jazz" by Jean Ann Wright, and here is an example of those blocks again, just the individual blocks, but they're broken up with the white background fabric, so if you look over here, there's the actual quilt and you can see it really shows the quilting, you get a nice feeling for the texture, and it really showcases each of the fabrics and lets them just stand on their own and sing. So I think that's a very good one. That last one by the way, if you were looking for it, this particular one, this is in "Jelly Roll Quilt Magic" by Kimberly Einmo, another very, very nice book. Another technique that I like is to be asymmetrical or to do the unusual in a quilt, and one of the things that we're seeing a lot is unusual border treatment. For instance, this one has that piano border that I absolutely love, but what I really like with this particular quilt is that they only used it top and bottom, there's no side border, and that makes for a lot of interest in the quilt. Another technique that I like to use a lot on quilts is I will only put the border on the bottom and on the left side, and that's because the bottom tends to anchor it and so our eye, if you have it on the left, that's where your eye tends to go first, is to the left because we read left to right, so your eye will go to the left-hand border and then because it's a vertical line, you're gonna go down and then you're gonna see this particular bottom border and so it can be a lot of interest. Another interesting thing to do is have two borders in one fabric and these two in a different fabric, or a different value or a different color even, makes for some very eye-catching interests. Sometimes, we don't have to do a lot to take a quilt from nice to fabulous. It just takes a little bit of extra thought. Another thing that's very popular, very modern, is the row quilt, and this would be somewhat of an example of it. Not a true row quilt, but typically, a row quilt will have several rows of blocks but they're usually divided by sashing. This one doesn't have the sashing but it still has the feel of a row quilt. Another thing that is very easy to do, we don't necessarily have to make blocks to have a great quilt. One of my very early long-arm quilt clients was a lovely lady who decided that she wanted to make a quilt for each of her grandchildren, and she brought them to me and I took one look at them and they were nothing but strips, the whole quilt was nothing but row after row after row after row of strips all the way across, 42 inches wide, forget how many down she did. This was before the day of the jelly roll. She cut all these strips and put them together, and they were so fun, she had picked each child's based on their favorite colors, on a theme, one was a ballerina, one was sports, one was soccer, one was dogs. We had more fun quilting those quilts and I know they were absolutely loved by those grandchildren. This is another great example of a strip quilt. All they did was sew the different patches in a line and then cut them and then sew the strips. Here's a better example of it, hopefully the camera's zooming in on it, but you can see these individual rows and they just alternate with if it has a square on the end or if it starts with a rectangle. By offsetting it like that, you aren't having to worry about your seams lining up, so this one's gonna go together lickety-split, quick as can be, so that's a winner in my book. Anytime I don't have to match all those points is a good day, and then this was another good example of strips except this time they went vertically. Same kind of concept, you piece a bunch of rectangles together, cut them up, piece them, and now you've got your pieced strips. You can actually do this as a strip piecing method and it all depends on which strip you're starting with for how those rectangles are gonna line up, so you can strip piece and save yourself a lot of time. Another thing that I like to do is put my quilts on a diagonal set. This would be considered an excellent example of a straight set. It's going right across a row and right down in a line. It's your classic quilt of blocks, you know, straight set. A diagonal set on the other hand has movement to it. Your quilt is interesting because you are looking at it like this, you have diagonal lines, the blocks are actually set on the diagonal, that is how you actually piece it, and that's what gives it the movement. I really like the diagonal set, and I wanna show you this picture here. When you have the diagonal set, you can see that the blocks are going diagonally. You will need to have setting triangles for the sides and the corners, and that's a different element of quilting than what we've covered in this one, obviously, but when you advance to triangles, you will find that it is more than worth the extra effort to put things on the diagonal because it will just give a lot of interest to your quilts. This would be an excellent example right here of that diagonal quilt, and the block is set on a diagonal. This one, it's not as easy to see because that particular block is made that way but a lot of blocks, if you take them and you just rotate it that 45 degrees, I think you'll be able to see that it gives you a new perspective on a block and it really is an easy way to change the look of your quilt. Now one thing that you need to keep in mind is when you go to a diagonal set, it does change the block orientation, it does create movement, but it's also gonna make your quilt larger. You need to multiply the block size by 1.414. That is the diagonal multiplier to find out the width of the diagonal or the length of the diagonal, and that will help you determine if you take the block size, multiply it times 1.414, and then multiply that by the number of blocks down and the number of blocks across will give you the length and width of your quilt and help you with the sizing. To increase the size of a quilt, speaking of making a quilt bigger, you can set it on the diagonal, you can add sashing which will add some extra inches in between the blocks, you can add multiple borders instead of just one border, add several borders. Another easy way if you don't wanna make a lot of blocks to make your quilt bigger is just use an alternating solid block in between and when I say solid, or plain block, what I mean is it's just a large patch, it's a 10-inch square fabric, an eight-inch square fabric, whatever your block size is, you alternate that with your pieced block and it not only adds a lot of interest, it adds a great space to show off your quilting, but it also will make your quilt a little bit bigger. If you want to avoid matching seams, which I always like to do, we showed you that one quilt, but here's a couple of others that I really liked that are options. One thing you can do is offset your blocks just like they did with the strip quilt. Those blocks are offset, meaning they don't line up, they're offset and you don't have to match seams. You can also alternate the plain blocks. You can change the block size in a row so that if you've got 10-inch blocks and then you come in with an eight-inch block, it's offset from the seam, and I'm gonna show you how to do that in our bonus project. My width of the quilt is 40 across, so I've got a row that's made with four 10-inch blocks, but then the next row is made with five eight-inch blocks, and I didn't have to match seams, which is a nice thing. You can also change the direction of the block, especially if you have rail, log cabin, or even striped blocks. It's very, very easy to change. In this particular case, we've got the log cabin blocks here, and because they have that solid line, that solid log as their last round on the square of the block, when you put the two of those together, you aren't having to match a seam. If you turned it the other way, then you're having to match the butt end here, and you're going to have to make sure that you piece that, so depending on how you alternate your block can make a difference. If you put sashing in between, you aren't having to match anything. The only problem with sashing though is you're going to want to take that line straight across, so if you haven't lined those up and it gets off just a little bit, just, I think it's off just a touch there, it's not as visually pleasing, so be careful with your sashing, but at least when you're sewing, you aren't having to make sure that you're working with the seams. This is another example of a good one where you aren't having to, you do have to match the points down here but you aren't matching across because you changed your direction, so at least you've minimized how often you're having to match. So that's another good option. So lots of possibilities out there. Sometimes we just need to think outside the box. This quilt was another one, it's all strips but they just offset it so now you can just whip through sewing that and not have to worry about matching up the seams or making sure that they turn in opposite directions because they aren't matching up, it's a little bit more forgiving, it's also very modern look, so don't be afraid to try some of the unusual ideas and be original with your quilts. I think you're gonna find that yes, it can be a little bit frustrating, sometimes I have to let a quilt sit on my design wall and play with it for two or three days, but once I get the right look, it's been worth all the effort and it really is a lot of fun. So have fun and go be a designer.