FO Friday...how to use an entire jelly roll....

Certain knitty people have been trying to lure me over to the dark side for quite a while.  Ironically, the dark side would be quilting. So knitters trying to convince a sewer (that would be someone who sews, not an artificial, underground conduit for carrying off sewage or rainwater.) to sew. Where is the problem?  Thing is, I have seen this quilting lark, it seems fairly addictive and I don't have the time or money to play so I have resisted and not bought a single fat quarter or jelly roll even if I have admired the amazing work they have produced.

A month or so ago I was having a quick look at Pintrest and saw this funky cushion. Of course, I pinned it and it started a few conversations. I liked the idea that it was made using a jelly roll as one of the things that puts me off patchworky things is the amount of cutting you have to do and it seemed a good way to investigate the jelly roll world.  I spent far too long looking at jelly rolls one night, decided that they were all too expensive for what is essentially stripes of fabric and didn't buy any then on Saturday night, J and L were asleep and M was away for the weekend and a fabric shop sent me a tempting email so a jelly roll found it's way into my basket and arrived yesterday.  I expected it to be in a roll like they are in shops and in pics on the internet but I guess they are cheaper to post this way and they still looked fab...

I wasn't planning on making the cushion last night but sometimes you just need to sew, don't you? Mindless sewing is good.  After a couple of hours, I ended up with this...

For one of the few times in my life I followed the instructions and made the cushion 16.5 inches square so the pad is slightly too big for the cover as you can see more in this photo...

While sewing the front I decided to make the back out of what bits of fabric I had left so I sewed the bits that I cut off the ends into strips then sewed the strips together. I ignored the voices in my head who were saying that I should be matching the seams up vertically and went with it. I think it looks quite cool and I have about one stripe worth of fabric left...that's good. It means that I haven't added to the fabric stash ;)

I did make an amendment to the original pattern. Once I had sewed the first strip onto the backing fabric I realised that the raw edge of the strips would be visible and apart from really disliking being able to see raw edges, I know what my little darlings are like; they will flip the strips up, the edges will fray more and I will get cross so once I had finished the front, I went back and zip-zagged the edges...

I'm going to hope over to Tami's blog to find some knitting inspiration with everyone's fab finished objects...I seem to be loosing my knitting mojo at the moment!