Diamond Dazzler 1

I have been able to get some sewing time in this past week! I worked on my scrappy Diamond Dazzler. I am working with the pattern from the book "On A Roll Again" and it states that this is not a beginner pattern. I agree. This is one pattern though where the bias edges seem to be your friend not foe. That is always good news! I am making a wedding gift with this pattern, but before I cut into the jelly rolls I wanted to do a dry run so to speak with some fabrics from my stash. I was worried about cutting into the jelly rolls because I had never bought jelly rolls before and the local quilt shop does not carry this fabric line. (Just in case you don't know, a jelly roll is a precut roll of fabric that is 2 1/2" wide. It usually consists of one of the fabric lines that a company puts out. The Moda rolls I bought had 40 different fabrics in each roll.) If I goofed up I would be one upset gal because I couldn't run out and easily replace fabric! I am glad I did this as I got confused a little in a couple of places, but all came out well in the end.


I have started the wedding gift quilt and so far so good. I goofed a little bit with a set of dark strips, but it was not a difficult fix - thanks to my making of the first quilt top I knew just what to do. I combined two fabric lines from Moda as I thought it would add interest to the quilt and one jelly roll wouldn't have been enough to make the quilt. I used the Portobello Market and the Heritage Collection For A Cause fabric lines. Since I am such a reproduction fabric fan I have loved working with the Heritage line. It is reproductions from 1846 and Moda is donating funds for Ovarian Cancer research from the sale of this fabric line. I think of this as "Two, two, two mints in one!" Remember the old commercial that had that saying? It seems like it was for Wrigley's Double Mint gum. There were two twins each holding gum in their hands and they bumped the gum together while they said the two, two, two mints in one thing. Okay I guess I just told everyone how old I was...if you remember the commercial too fess up! Anyway, when I get to work with reproduction fabrics and support a great cause at the same time that is double fun for me. I thought I would show a photo to explain a little better how this quilt goes together.

In a nut shell, you sew strip sets together, cut goofy triangle shapes and then sew them together to make a rectangle block. The tricky part is that there are mirror image shapes going on here and you must stay organized in your cutting and piecing or you are lost and can come up with some pretty weird looking blocks that won't work at all. When I saw this book I thought, cool, I will use the precut jelly rolls and that will save a lot of cutting time. I found that not to be true with this quilt. You must take the 2 1/2" strips and cut them down to 2 1/4" widths to make this pattern work. Okay, it was a little easier then cutting into yardage, but it still made extra cutting time. I also bought some fourth yard cuts of some light backgrounds and a couple of darks where I bought the jelly rolls just in case there were not enough lights or darks in the jelly rolls to suit me. I was glad I did, as I cut into each of the extra fabrics that I bought. Did I absolutely need to add to the jelly roll? I did for the lights but I could have gotten away with the dark fabrics in the jelly rolls if I had to. The wedding is in March, but I would prefer to give this gift at the shower. Time will tell if this will be a shower gift or a gift at the wedding itself!