Ready for a jelly roll quilt? Here we have another version of my Window Panes baby quilt sewn up in a Ruby Star Society jelly roll. (The fabric line is Adorn by Rashida Coleman-Hale. You can find it here on Etsy* or here at the Fat Quarter Shop. In Australia, you’ll find it at The Next Stitch.)
The Window Panes quilt pattern has instructions for 5 quilt sizes: baby, throw, twin, queen and king.
- The baby quilt finishes at approximately 38½” x 50½”
- The throw quilt finishes at approximately 56½” x 66½”
- The twin quilt finishes at approximately 62½” x 86½”
- The queen quilt finishes at approximately 98½” x 98½”
- The king quilt finishes at approximately 110½” x 98½”
Window Panes is a jelly roll and fat quarter friendly quilt pattern. It’s also perfect to make with scraps, left over WOF strips, half used F8/FQs – you get the picture! It’s a great one for cleaning up all your leftover fabric cuts. You can see an example of a scrappy, FQ version of Window Panes over here.
The fun part of the baby size pattern is that the blocks for each row can be made with the same WOF strips. This will give a more ordered look, with each row matching. That’s what I’ve done here with my Adorn fabric jelly roll.
There are a lot of beautiful colours in the Adorn jelly roll – it was hard to decide how I wanted to constrain the palette. In the end I went with a pink/chartreuse/aqua theme and chose the dark navy strips to top and tail the larger blocks.
For sashing I used another jelly roll of Kona cotton solids in Snow. (If you’re using a jelly roll for sashing and another for the blocks, you’ll be able to sew 2 baby quilts from the 2 jelly rolls.)
Some other fun jelly roll quilt options:
- make window blocks for 3 baby quilts from 1 colourful jelly roll
- there’s sashing for 2 baby quilts in 1 jelly roll
- make window blocks for 1 throw and 1 baby quilt from 1 colourful jelly roll
- make 1 complete twin quilt top from 2 jelly rolls (1 for windows, 1 for sashing)
- make 1 complete queen or king quilt top from 4 jelly rolls (2 for windows, 2 for sashing)
I have never made a quilt entirely from pre-cuts before and it sewed up SO QUICKLY. Seriously, I felt guilty how little time it took. These jelly roll quilts – I think they’re onto something here!
I backed this quilt with a run of yardage I’ve had in my cupboard for a decade. I bought this fabric to make a coat for my wee little daughter. She is now 15 and taller than me; you could say it didn’t go so well. But I do think the print goes swimmingly with Rashida’s lovely pinks so maybe it was meant to be.
For the quilting, I quilted this myself on my domestic machine, using my walking foot. I wanted something fast, easy and that encouraged drape, so minimal quilting. I followed all the vertical seam lines with a wavy stitch line, no marking required. It was great to have this quilted up so quickly.
Another first for me – I made my binding with strips from the jelly roll. Normally I cut my binding 2-1/4″ thick, but the temptation of super-quick binding prep was too great. It was so easy to grab strips, sew, press – and voilà, there’s my binding.
Sewing the binding to the front of the quilt was no different that usual. I always sew my binding on to an untrimmed quilt, and then trim the excess away before sewing the binding down at the back. (Every now and then I will square up a quilt before sewing the binding, but only if it’s really pushing the line between rectangle and parallelogram :) Letting go of squaring has been wonderful for productivity.)
When it was time to flip the binding to the back of the quilt I had a choice to make. I could trim the quilt with a fatter edge so that my binding would wrap around to same place as usual (the fatter edge would take up the extra quarter inch of binding). Or I could trim my quilt edges as usual (quarter inch) and accept that the binding would wrap around and further beyond where it would normally sit.
I went with the latter as I didn’t mind the binding being wider on the back than the front. This actually worked well as I was planning to machine stitch the binding down with a zigzag stitch.
I have a tutorial on zigzag binding over here. I love how it looks like eyelashes on the front:
On the back the zigzag could barely be seen as there was no overlap with the backing fabric, due to the wider binding.
It looks great and it’s very durable – just what you want for a baby quilt.
If you have a stash of jelly rolls (or FQs or scraps) that are begging to be turned into a quilt, then you’ll love the Window Panes quilt pattern.
You can find the pattern for sale now, in my shop.
Happy sewing!
