Jelly Roll Rug
I was really excited to end the summer with a transfer opportunity at work. I’m working in a much busier area and I even get my own office! With a window! There I was on Amazon looking for a wall calendar, coffee maker, and a rug. I searched and searched for a rug that would fit under my desk. I wanted something cute and colorful but also soft. I wasn’t finding anything I liked or that would add personality to this very sterile office. And then it hit me! Why would I buy a rug when I could make one??
I watched this great video tutorial about a year ago showing how to make a rug out of a jelly roll. What is a jelly roll you ask? It’s a precut set of fabrics put out by the major fabric designers. It 40 strips of fabric that are 2.5” x width of fabric (usually 42”). It includes all the fabrics in a specific designer’s collection. These bundles are great for quilt making or making stripy bags. Well, another use for these is to sew them all together to make one long fabric snake that you can then sew together into a rug - think of the old fashioned rag rugs that your grandma used to make.
I got so excited about this idea! What a great excuse to do a sewing project! So I re-watched Erica’s tutorial and started looking at what jelly roll I wanted to get. I knew I wanted something with a nice rainbow of colors because I would like the rug to go with all seasons (although I’m not opposed to making a special holiday rug if this goes pretty fast). I decided to go with Lori Holt’s Farm Girl Vintage collection. I had already bought several of the patterns for bags and I really like the colors and patterns. I also bought the batting necessary for the rug but it turns out I wasn’t looking closely and bought the 2.25” instead of the 2.5”. I decided to go with it - I don’t think it’s going to affect the design much and I didn’t really want to be stuck with 50 yards of that with no other project to use it on.
The project started off okay with me deciding what order I wanted to put the strips in. I mostly stuck with the order they were in but since there were two of most of them I separated them into two bundles so that the rainbow would repeat half way through. I think the hardest part is that, since I wasn’t making a standard size, I had to try and figure out how many strips I was going to need to get to the right size. I looked online but no one had an easy way to calculate this so I just had to guess. We’ll see at the end if I’m anywhere close. I figure if I have extra I can make a placemat or something. The one thing that no one has mentioned about jelly rolls - THEY SHED. Like, big time! It makes sense because all the edges have been pinked with pinking shears but I just wasn’t prepared for the amount of dust and lint that was all over my cutting table, ironing board, and my clothes. I finally decided to take them outside and shake them out in the lawn to get rid of all the little pieces.
The next step was just sewing all the strips together. That went pretty fast. Then I decided to iron all of them before I put the batting in. Then I inserted the batting and folded them in towards the middle and in half again, like a strap, so all the raw edges were hidden. I was trying to figure out a good way to do this without dumping everything on the floor. Then I remembered that I have these cute boxes from Joanns. I was able to nicely fold the snake as I ironed it into one box and then take the sandwiched, clipped snake and transfer that into the other box. And it was easy from there to do the same thing with the piece as I sewed it together at the machine.
Next we get into the reason I delayed doing a project like this for so long. I have my old Bernina that has been repaired several times but just hasn’t been the same since I tried sewing thick bag layers together about a year ago. I had bought my semi-industrial Juki machine, which has worked great, but it’s only a straight stitch so I had to use the Bernina for this project as I needed the zig zag stitch. I keep the Bernina as backup for things like this and any future garment projects I want to try but the machine really isn’t reliable enough to even be a backup at this point. And sure thing, when I went to sew the pieces together, the machine didn’t work - just gave me a jumble of thread. So I had to bite the bullet and get another machine. The problem here is that I am not going to use this other machine very often and didn’t really want to spend a lot of money on something that was going to sit around most of the time. I started by looking at another used Bernina because I already have all the feet I want but decided I would be more comfortable with another Juki. So welcome the Juki HZL-80! It’s been working like a dream!
And back to the project. I was able to sew the snake to itself, slowly. Things went well until I got a little further out on the curves and then it really started getting wavy. The instructions call for you to iron it flat every few rows but it was just getting more and more wavy. I figured out towards the end that if I tucked one row slightly under the other, the curve worked better but by then I was almost done. Part of me is tempted to tear the thing apart and fix it but I would have to take half of it apart and I’m just done with the whole thing at this point. I will take it into the office and hope that it flattens over time. But it’s done!
The Details:
Pattern: Jelly Roll Rug pdf pattern by Roma Quilts
Finished size: 9”w x 5”h x 1.5”d
Lori Holt’s Farm Girl Vintage Rolie Polie (different version of a jelly roll)
Video Tutorial by Erica Arndt
