Wishful Thinking

Way way back, long long ago, when we were still pretending that it was summer, H and I went to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC, mainly to look at the awesome displays, and a little bit to see what a quilt show could offer in the way of strawberry fabric for a project that was, and is, still entirely in my mind.

What I discovered, was Jelly Rolls, bundles of 2 1/2" fabric strips in every theme under the sun. I was held powerless by their charms, and H helped to choose the one that should come home with us. Purchased purely because we both loved the fabric.

The thing with Jelly Rolls is that when you're not at the quilt show and you can't see the fabric spread our around, you can only see hints around the outside of what it could be. It's very intriguing, and so the Jelly Roll came out of the cupboard and started to sit on the corner of my desk. After a few suicide dives off the corner of the table it moved to sit on the sewing machine, and I started to do a little research into patterns and pattern books.

And that was when I saw Pat's latest quilt (incidentally she makes all sorts of amazing things), and I knew that this was what the Jelly Roll wanted to be, because that pattern says 'Stars' to me.





A quick trip to Amazon later and I have two wonderful sources of inspiration for scrappy quilts, Jelly Roll Quilts and the source of the new quilt, Twosey-Foursey Quilts. And of course, I got to unroll the jelly:



Cue Hugh Fraser reading 'Cat Amongst the Pigeons', to cut and sew this:


Which, after hasty arrangement for photographic purposes, could look like this:





It's by no means the final arrangement, but you can see the stars. This Jelly Roll doesn't seem to be available in the UK any more, at least not that I could find easily over the internet, but I found a great US site, The Quilted Castle, who seem to specialise in Jelly Rolls, and whose selection I can drool over quite happily! Despite everything else that I need to so and should do, I'm stalking the postman.

If you were wondering why the title to this post is Wishful Thinking, well, I think that you need to take a little closer peek at some of these stars:




Do you spot a theme yet? Anything spring to mind in particular?




My love of a particular weather phenomenon is well documented (here and here and here and here, well you get the picture), so you see why it was hard to resist a jelly roll called, "It's snowing!"

Here's hoping.