Jelly Roll Race Quilt

When you travel to Florida to escape Iowa's harsh winter, you need to take your sewing machine.  But you can't really take all your fabric, can you?  Therefore my older and wiser sister, Nancy, suggested I make a jelly roll race quilt.  Sounded fast and fun, so I followed her suggestion.

I bought 2 complementary jelly roll packs of 20 strips each.  One in shades of turquoise and one in shades of purple.  I wanted to make a lap sized quilt.  

I laid our all my strips on the top of this photo so that they looked good next to each other and tried to mix up my purples and turquoise.  Then I started sewing them all together end to end.  Before you start sewing your strips together to make a strip of 2, you need to cut about 18 inches off of one end of your incredibly looooong strip so that the ends are staggered throughout your quilt.

I took each end and started sewing the strips together.  When I got almost to the middle, I cut it so that I could finish my strip of 2 wide.  Next I took the ends of the 2 wide strips and started sewing them together till I got almost to the middle and cut it so I could finish sewing that strip of 4 wide.

The first strip of 2 wide takes the longest to sew!  I thought I would never get done and wondered why in the world I had tackled this project.  It was sort of boring...  Anyway, as I started sewing more and more strips together, each time cutting it in half, it became faster and I marveled at the color combinations I was getting.

Here I am done with the basic quilt and trying to figure out borders for it...