Twinkler Test Block ~ Jelly Roll Quilt

Oh how you sparkle and oh how you shine!  So simple and sweet.  She's a little wonky but once in the quilt no one will ever know.  I knew this would be the case for these blocks since I decided not to starch the fabrics.  Starching jelly roll strips can cause shrinkage and waviness during the pressing of the fabric strips.  Not a chance I was willing to take.

Another thing I did to safeguard against  inaccuracy was to layout my block on the mini design board and mark the diagonal stitch lines for the stitch and flip method.  Instead of drawing the line, a small dot was made on two corners of each background fabric for the star points.

You can see the small dots in the image below.  Adding the dots was faster and easier.  Now I could stitch in the proper direction every time. There's very little scrap fabric left on each Jelly Roll strip after cutting for one block.  Not much room for errors, so I want to insure proper stitching and cutting every time..

Because I don't like to waste even the tiniest bit of fabric another line was stitched about 1/2" away from the first line.  Then I cut in between both stitched lines to make the bonus half square triangle.

These will be trimmed to a usable size and stored after the quilt top is finished.  After trimming they will be stored with the thousands of other HST's waiting to become a quilt.

I hope this bowl is big enough for 336 HST's.  Oh my!  That's a lot of trimming! 

Jelly rolls are never the perfect 2.5" wide.  This roll was a little too wide.  Too big is better than too small.  Instead of trimming the excess I centered the background fabric on top of the print fabric as best as I could.

When stitching them together I used the edge of the background fabric as my seam guide as suggested by so many quilters out there on the internet.  I'm sure it worked great for them and I appreciate them taking the time to share the tip.  However, from this point forward I'm trimming off the excess before stitching. Not all tricks and tips work for everyone.

Todays goal is finish cutting is to finish the cutting for all the blocks and piece as many as the day will allow.  

If you would like to make your own Twinkle blocks I'm providing a simple cutting chart for one block.  

Background Fabric

A (13) 2.5 x 2.5

D (4) 3.5 x 3.5

E (4) 2.5 x 3.5

Print from one Jelly Roll Strip

B (4) 2.5 x 2.5

C (8) 2.5 x 3.5

Below is the layout for my quilt and background yardage requirements to make a quilt with

(42) 12" blocks 

 2.5" sashings

 2.5" outer border

 The yardage was calculated by EQ8.  I added a half yard more for mistakes in the program and for human cutting errors.

7 1/4  Yards of Background Fabric

Finished quilt size 

86 x 100

I'm linking up this blog post at the following linky parties.  If you're a quilt party kind of quilter then you'll love all the inspiration.  So hop on over! 

Finished or Not Friday

TGIFF

Off the Wall Friday

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