It doesn’t take much to start me off onto journeys new.  A whisper on the wind can jolt me into a new adventure just as quickly as can a blog post in glorious technicolor.  And so it was, I was minding my own business on Saturday afternoon, tootling along I was, not a care in the world when I came across a blog post which essentially took my breath away by my good friend Carie.  In it she describes the wonderous nature of the Lasagne Quilt, so I just thought I would have a little google and found this… Video by Missouri quilt company and that was it, I was lost and gone.  You see, I had these Jelly Rolls in my stash and I used to sit there some nights thinking, I wish you could just sew them up and it would look nice and then I could see all of those lovely fabrics.  And then I used to say to myself, ‘nah, it would just look horrible, you know you need to put time into a quilt’ and then I would sigh deeply, bemoan my lack of time and promise myself that I would make that quilt for myself,,, one day.

Firstly there was maths, I needed to know if I could make an approximation of a superking sized quilt with 2 jelly rolls.  It didn’t have to have lots of fabric hanging over, (although that would have been nice,) but it did need to look like it fitted the bed.  The basic maths comprises of width in inches by 32 rows (which would be 64″) divided by length of strip after sewing, which in my case was 43″ as I’d decided to do a square end to my strip rather than a mitre, for two reasons, I fancied it and secondly I need to maximise every square inch.  And this then gives you the number of strips you need.  So that when you multiply the strips and cut them in half and go from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32, you get the width you want.   After that you need to add the strips to make the length you want.  I needed ten more strips to make the length, but I needed to get the width right first.  

Nope that didn’t work, it needed too many strips., I only have eighty strips.

And nor did that.

And this leaves me with eight strips spare.  So I need to do more maths and then I thought, bearing in mind its meant to be a speedy quilt.

But I carried on. 

And success was mine.  I tried it with 80″ wide and adding 9 rows to make it 82″ long and realised I could make it 84″ long..  Yippee, now in an ideal world I would have liked it just a bit wider, but it would still work.

And then I found my strips and counted my strips and there was one missing!  I had 79 strips..  lets hope this maths is right.

And then I found my fat quarters that matched for the binding.

I sewed the 32 rows starting with sewing 60 of the strips end to end and not forgetting to cut off approx 18″ off the first strip of fabric to allow the pattern to stagger, then sewing the full length of the stripe together, hint: watch the video and cutting and repeating.  With some trepidation I placed it on the bed to see if I had indeed got the right width and did a very happy, happy dance.   Yes, it was going to be fine… yay.   Now I wondered if I would get my ten strips added before running out of stripes.  And I added these 5 rows to each end and sewn them backwards and forwards starting at the same end that I had finished on and alternating the end of the big long strip so that the patterns always mismatched (well as much as possible)

Sorry gratuitous pussy cat photos.

Yes, I managed to get all ten stripes added.  May I present, one glorious, stunningly beautiful quilt top, of which I will long admire and now can at long last see the beautiful fabrics that I was so drawn to and that have been sat in my stash for such along time. .  (when it gets finished remains to be seen)  It probably took about 4 hours maybe longer….  I know I went to bed and then did  35 minutes to finish it today.   And what was the fabric?  It was Fabric Freedom, Spice Trail.

And what was left of the 79 strips.  This was left, so its probably quite important to round your maths up, just to make sure, which is what I did.