Out of the basket, onto the couches!

I was rummaging around under my craft table yesterday looking for something else when I came across a big basket of jelly roll quilts and a few others that I had made over the years and then forgotten about! I decided they needed to see the light of day, so now they're draped over my couches and a rocking chair.

This the first jelly roll quilt that I ever made, 11 years ago. I made it during a quilt retreat where one of the speakers got us all excited about making Jelly Roll 1600 quilts and then sold us jelly rolls so we could jump right in. (If you sew all the strips in a jelly roll end to end, they are 1600 inches long. Google it for construction details.) 

Normally I don't use such subdued colors, but I liked it better than her other jelly rolls. Note that I "zinged" it up a little with some dashes of orange batik. (They look brown in the photo because the lighting was poor.) It's sort of appropriate that I made it in the Northwest, with its soft, watery colors.

But most of them are as bright and cheerful as the desert flowers that I took pictures of on this morning's hike. I made these ones in Sedona when we used to go there every year for the month of March to hike. I would bring my machine and a jelly roll and sew them in my down time. Jelly rolls became my vacation projects.

Desert marigold

Cactus flowers

Clover?

Here are some links to other pictures of the jelly roll quilts in my blog:

blue-and-yellow-and-jelly-roll-quilt.html

color-to-rescue.html

stitch-pulling-out-pink.html

rolling-out-color.html

Not all the quilts in the basket were jelly rolls. Here's one that I had totally forgotten about making. It's also from my Northwest days, hence the sea glass greens and soft shades. It'll live on my couch for awhile in front of the lemon pottery that picks up its yellows.

Fairy duster

And I made this one since I moved to Tucson. It's another couch quilt. I guess what really pulls all these pieces together is that I never intended for them to hang on the wall, like all my other quilts. So they're my only quilts without have hanging sleeves. And that's a wrap!

Have a colorful day