Contents
Introduction
Over the past thirty years since opening The Quilt Room in Dorking we have accumulated a collection of antique quilts from both sides of the Atlantic and we love everything about them. There is nothing more inspiring than seeing the quilts of bygone days, and having them on display in the shop has been a treat for staff and customers alike. A number of them are showing some wear and tear and their colours are a little faded but it does nothing to diminish their beauty – in fact it only enhances their appeal.
We have often considered using some of the patterns from these antique quilts to make modern-day versions and gradually the idea took hold. The fact that most of the quilts have a scrappy look to them made the use of a jelly roll perfect. But could we make these patterns from jelly rolls? You bet we could! We also have friends with gorgeous antique quilts and made the most of this when choosing patterns to make for this book.
Our antique quilts are all bed size and as we only wanted to use ‘just one jelly roll’ in each quilt we wondered how we would get around this. As it turned out it was a win-win situation as the array of different colours in each quilt comes from the jelly roll and the addition of extra background fabric allowed us to create bed size quilts, which we felt was important for our ‘today’s heirloom’ quilts.
The antique quilts were our inspiration and our modern-day quilts are as near as possible to the antique version, although we have allowed ourselves some artistic licence. Most of our antique quilts didn’t have labels so we cannot give the makers the credit due to them. We can only thank all those anonymous quilters of the past for the inspiration they have given us. We hope you will enjoy browsing through our selection of antique quilts and, more importantly, we hope you enjoy creating your very own heirloom quilts.
Getting Started
What is a Jelly Roll?
A jelly roll is a roll of forty fabrics cut in 21⁄2in wide strips across the width of the fabric. Moda introduced jelly rolls to showcase new fabric ranges. How inspirational to have one 21⁄2in wide strip of each new fabric wrapped up so deliciously! If you want to make any of the jelly roll quilts in this book and don’t have a jelly roll to use, then cut a 21⁄2in wide strip from forty fabrics in your stash and you can follow all the instructions in just the same way. Our patterns are based on a jelly roll strip being 42in long.
Imperial or Metric?
Jelly rolls from Moda are cut 21⁄2in wide and at The Quilt Room we have continued to cut our strip bundles 21⁄2in wide. When quilt making, it is impossible to mix metric and imperial measurements. It would be absurd to have a 21⁄2in strip and tell you to cut it 6cm to make a square! It wouldn’t be square and nothing would fit. This caused a dilemma when writing instructions for the quilts and a decision had to be made. All our instructions therefore are written in inches. To convert inches to centimetres, multiply the inch measurement by 2.54. For your convenience, any extra fabric you will need, given in the Requirements panel at the start of the quilt instructions, is given in both metric and imperial.
Seam Allowance
We cannot stress enough the importance of maintaining an accurate scant 1⁄4in seam allowance throughout. Please take the time to check your seams with the test in General Techniques.
Quilt Size
In this book we show what can be achieved with just one jelly roll. We have added background fabric and borders but the basis of each quilt is just one jelly roll. The size of our quilts is therefore restricted to this fact but there is nothing to stop you using more fabric and increasing the size of your quilt. The Vital Statistics in each chapter gives you all the information you need to enable you to do some simple calculations to make a larger quilt.
Scattered throughout the book there are features called Heirloom Quilt Ideas, giving suggestions on how you might alter the quilt designs. You would, however, need to amend the fabric requirements if changing the quilt layout.
Diagrams
Diagrams have been provided to assist you in making the quilts
