Sixteen blocks, one jelly roll, and a quilt that finishes at 47 1/2 inches square. Sherri McConnell had been asked for this pattern for years before she sat down and drew it.
The requests came in through her shop. People wanted a sampler they could cut from a single jelly roll, and she had plenty of jelly roll quilts but no sampler among them. She finished this one in time for National Sew a Jelly Roll Day, and she pieced the quilt itself in a day, without even having the blocks cut ahead.
What the constraint costs is the part worth hearing. Working from 2 1/2 inch strips means you can't cut a flying geese unit or a half square triangle oversized and trim it back, because there's no spare fabric to trim away. She says as much in the video, then adds that the same quilt works from a layer cake if building units that way is how you like to sew. The blocks don't change. The margin does.
The sixteen include two flower blocks, a pinwheel, several star variations, some flying geese, and a few that are plain patchwork. Her sashing carries small four patches and strip pieced sections, and it rotates as it goes around the quilt, so the layout diagram matters more here than it usually does. At 47 1/2 inches it lands as a wall hanging or a table topper, and she points out that nine of the blocks make a smaller hanging and four of them make a pillow.
Close to 30,000 quilters have watched it since 2023.
If you want to know when oversizing and trimming earns its extra fabric and when the strip you already have is enough, we wrote up the methods and the size chart here: how to make half square triangles.
Sherri's channel is A Quilting Life.
