jelly roll race

Some of you have probably heard of the jelly roll race quilts aka 1600 quilt.

Well I hadn't paid much attention to them until I saw one pinned about a month ago.

I got this hair brained idea to make one for each of my staff this year for Christmas.

I started my very first one with Fig Tree fabric.
It's actually 2 1/2" strips that I had left over from 2 quilt projects.
Some of the strips had bits cut off but for the most part they were intact.

I started by sewing the ends together on the 45 degree angle like I make my binding.

This left me with one continuous strip of 2 1/2" x god knows what? 1600" maybe.

It was A LOT.

I followed a tutorial

( that I can't find the exact right now but google jelly roll race tutorial and tons of stuff pops up)

You basically take opposite ends of the strip

and lay them right sides together along the LONG seam and sew down the side 1/4" seam.

After you sew god knows how long maybe 800"...

you come to the end loop which you cut in half and finish sewing your seam.

Here is a part of my strip after 2 rounds.

and another view.
I pressed each time I sewed.

As you sew your strips together your length gets cut in half and the width doubles.
It's really quite cool.

Here's my finished quilt top.

I absolutely love how random it turned out.
And it was sooo easy.

Given that it was my first try at this, it took me 2 hours to sew it.

I have already taken it to my quilter and only have 5 more to go.

I have lots of ideas about how I am going to make each quilt look unique

 even though they are based on the same principal.

I will post each top as I complete them so you can see how adding squares, sewing straight edge instead of angle or adding rectangles will change the look.

The truth is, is that even I don't know what the result will be.

and that is pretty cool.