Project Commencement: Friendship Braid Quilt

First step: Cut 160 Trapezoids

Today I started cutting the pieces for the Friendship Braid quilt from the Jelly Roll Quilts book. I’m using a Moda jelly roll, which I pre-washed by throwing it in a normal wash in a delicates bag. I prefer to pre-wash all my fabrics rather than risking colour bleeding or shrinkage after the quilt has been pieced.

Based on the fact that everyone has their own recommended approach, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a right or wrong way to prepare quilting fabric. I routinely wash it but I don’t starch and I don’t use fabric softener. Quilting fabric goes in with the family laundry, with a colour catcher added if I feel there’s a risk of dye running.

I pre-wash batts, too. I put them in my front-loader on a wool cycle, with no laundry detergent and they hold together just fine. I prefer a smooth quilt over a puckered one and I don’t generally re-wash before gifting or using the quilt, so it’s good to have all the washing out of the way up front.

The clothes airer works brilliantly for drying the jelly roll strips. I wouldn’t dream of using the drier for them – way too much wear and tear. I suspect I wouldn’t have any fabric left to sew if I used the drier. The strips do get a bit hairy in the washing machine, but I can live with that.

Cutting in Progress

The cutting for this quilt was a little tedious. The hard part was making sure to cut trapezoids for the lighter shades and reverse trapezoids for the darker shades. From time to time I got that part wrong and I’m going to argue it was deliberate, to break up the colours a bit and add visual interest. Other than that, you line up your Omnigrid 96L, using the 2 1/2 and the 5 inch lines as references and cut away. There’s not much room for error as you don’t get a whole lot of fabric left over at the end of each strip. If I really had to re-cut a trapezoid I could probably find a scrap long enough, but I’d have to audition a few off-cuts before I did.

More on this topic: Getting Started on the Friendship Braid Quilt

Cutting the Garden Trellis Blocks

Those of you who are regular visitors will recall that I am working on a Garden Trellis Jelly Roll Quilt originally planned as a friend’s 40th birthday present. Progress stalled when I remembered that an Omnigrid 96L and an Omnigrid 98L have their lines running in different directions. I’d come up with a workaround using masking tape but then my Omnigrid 98L finally arrived, three months after I ordered it from eBay vendor Getta Notion. I can only assume the US postal service must have been using the polar route for their deliveries over the holiday season. I got back in touch with Getta Notion and paid the money they had refunded and now I’m back in business.

Today I cut the jelly roll strips into squares.

These are the instructions I followed for using the Omnigrid 98L to cut blocks out of a jelly roll tube. You line the 31/2 inch line on the Omnigrid 98L up against the middle seam line. After I’d made the first cut, I also used the 90° line on my cutting mat as a reference to make sure each block was cut true.

Using a Seam Ripper to remove the Seam

Then I gently unpicked the seam at the apex of the triangle and opened it up to form a square. I pressed towards the dark fabric. I like the idea of quilters going to the dark side…

Omnigrid 96L

I saw from my blog stats that someone found their way here after doing a search on Omnigrid. I had recently been looking for an Omnigrid myself and had trouble finding pictures or information.

The reason for wanting to research the Omnigrid 96L is that this is the half square triangle ruler recommended in the Jelly Roll Quilts book that I posted about a couple of months ago. Specifically they recommend it for the friendship braid quilt featured on the cover of that book. I desperately want to make that particular quilt and having ‘earned’ some money by selling off a couple of bits and pieces on eBay recently, I decided to go ahead and get the Omnigrid 96L. Here it is.

Omnigrid 96L Half Square Triangle Ruler

As I’ve mentioned before, the jelly rolls at Spotlight, my local fabric and home furnishings store are thin and not to my taste so I have little choice but to cut my own. Their half square triangle ruler (choice of one, if my memory serves me correctly) didn’t impress me either so I turned to eBay and bought mine from Getta Notion in Creston Iowa.

Now, I’ve been to Iowa and I know it’s a long, long way from my home here in the South Pacific. I was delighted when the delivery took just over a week. The price, including that lightning fast delivery, was only a couple of dollars more than what Spotlight would have charged, for a different (and to my eye, inferior) brand.

The friendship braid can’t start until I’ve finished the tumbling spools quilt top, where I have three more spools blocks to go, and the jelly roll sampler quilt along, where I have two blocks to go.

In the next couple of weeks though, there will be more cutting and house cleaning done than piecing because my Husqvarna Viking is going in for a service. Maybe it’s just the cold weather but it seemed to be struggling a bit just lately so I thought a service might be in order. Here’s hoping that all is well with my machine and that those other chores get done while it’s away.