Beach Ball - a jelly roll quilt tutorial (and giveaway!)

After finishing up my DUDQS mini quilt last week, I jumped straight in to making a larger version. I bought a jelly roll of Zen Chic's recently released Sphere collection a few months ago, and decided to design this quilt using just the jelly roll plus a fat quarter of background fabric for the setting triangles.

I've written up a mini tutorial for how I put it together - and I also have a giveaway offered by the Fat Quarter Shop at the end of the post :o)

I've designed this quilt using a jelly roll, but you could easily substitute for a range of 2.5" strips from your stash. To plan out your layout, I suggest using some equilateral triangle graph paper (you can download it free from here). The jelly roll I used for this quilt included a nice proportion of lighter value prints (15 of the 40 strips) which made it easy to play with the background hexagons. If you are working with a bigger variety of colours it might be useful to plan out colour placement to make sure you end up with a balanced layout. If you wanted to make a bigger quilt, it would be a good way to work out your layout too.

A few things to keep in mind:
* Each strip set will yield 9 triangles, enough to make one full hexagon, and one half hexagon per strips set. If you cut two strip sets, you would have enough triangles to make three full hexagons.
* For this quilt, I used 96 triangles, twelve across by eight down. I had several half-hexagons left over, which will become part of the back.

This quilt top finishes up at 45" x 50", a good size lap quilt for a child, or a large baby quilt. It would be really easy to make it bigger by using more strips.

All seams are a scant quarter inch, and I have pressed my seams open at all stages.

I started by sorting the jelly roll into colour sets, separating the lighter value prints (in this case the grey and white based prints) from the darker ones.

Next, split each colour into sets of three strips. Some of my strip sets included one strip with a contrast in colour or value.

Sew each of these strip sets together along the long edge. For the strip sets with one contrasting strip, make this the central strip in the strip set, as this will form a continuous ring within the hexagons. Press your seam open.

Next cut each of the strip sets using either a 60 degree triangle ruler:

Or using the 60 degree line on your ruler, lining up the line on your ruler with the bottom or top of the strip set.

Continue down the strip set, flipping the strip set or ruler as you go. You will end up with 9 triangles from each strip set.

Setting Triangles:

To avoid trimming off the sides of the quilt, and losing some of the width of the quilt, I added setting triangles at the end of each row. To make these, cut strips the same width as your strip sets (6.5") from your fat quarter of background fabric. Make a 60 degree cut with your ruler, and then make a vertical cut, 4" in along the long edge, and 1/4" from the shorter side (see below).  Continue along the strip, cutting a total of 16 setting triangles. 

Piecing the quilt:

At this stage, you could lay out your pieces and start piecing the rows together. I found it easier to piece together my darker coloured triangles into half-hexagons first, as it was much easier to switch them around on my design wall until I found a layout I liked. 

When sewing these half hexagons together, match up the seams along one edge and pin at each seam (I pin the side of the seam that will be sewn first). 

You will end up with three half-hexagons from each strip set.

Lay out your pieces into rows (here I have 8 rows of 12 triangles, plus a setting triangle at the end of each row). Adrianne has written an awesome tutorial on sewing equilateral triangles if you'd like some tips on how to do this. 

Once your rows are sewn, sew your rows together in pairs, carefully pinning the seams where your hexagon strips meet. Continue sewing together in pairs, until you have a complete quilt top. 

 In regards to the layout, you could easily make this quilt with full hexagons interlocking across the quilt, rather than using partial hexagons as I have done. In fact, the layout possibilities are endless - I'm planning on making another bigger version of this one at some stage soon. It's a quick and fun top to put together.

If you have any questions please just leave a comment or send me an email. If you do use this tutorial to make a quilt, please send me a photo!

So, on to the giveaway! The Fat Quarter Shop have generously offered the choice of any jelly roll to one of my readers.

To enter, just leave me a comment letting me know which jelly roll you would choose. My followers get an extra entry - just leave a second comment letting me know how you follow. If you would like a third entry, share this post (on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram) and leave a third comment with the link to your post.

International entries are welcome, and I will draw a winner next Monday (9th December) at 9pm AEST. The winner is Crickets Corner, who has been contacted by email.

xx Jess