Starting my first quilting project!

Back in January 2011 I was all inspired to start getting into quilting...and I bought a couple of great looking books about making quilts and my first 'jelly roll' of quilt fabric on ebay. Finally, a year later I have started making my first quilting project. I'm following the 'bars of gold' pattern from the book called "Jelly Roll Quilts" by Pam and Nicky Lintott and using the 'Wee Woodland' jelly roll fabric described here . Last year I initially had a grand plan to make a king-sized quilt as my first project, but now I have decided to just make a smallish quilt to master the basic techniques first, then work up to doing a massive quilt for our bedroom.

The jelly roll has 40 strips of fabric in it. I have sewn these together in batches of 5 strips each, ironed the seams, then cut 5 x 7inch sections from each of strips. Then the fun part of laying all the pieces on the floor and deciding which order to put them together in to make a nice random pattern. My little "helper" Puss seems happy with this layout (see photo). Next I'll need to stitch the pieces together vertically, and buy some fabric to make the borders and backing and binding etc.