Quilting my Urban Odyssey Jelly Roll quilt AKA the "Done is Better than Perfect" Quilt

I bought these 2.5 inch Urban Odyssey strips from Connecting Threads and sewed them into a quick quilt ages ago. It's like the Jelly Roll Race 2 quilt from MSQC. I used 2 jelly roll packs because they had less than 40 strips but I can't remember how many there were. I pulled out the brown colorway strips and used them for the inner border and the little squares. To use two of the same prints, I sewed them short ends together with a square between to break them up a bit. if you sew them like individual strips, they can fall in weird places in the quilt and sew together in distracting ways. I love how the brown squares are scattered like confetti.

This month I finally got back to quilting it. I already had it layered and basted and begun using a method found in One Line at a Time, Encore by Charlotte Warr Andersen but I found it more difficult than it looked. I kept running into my templates and sewing over them. It was hard to pick out and just more frustrating than I wanted. I should have started out with one of her straight line designs on a smaller quilt. I loved the book and will use her method in another project. This quilt been languishing on my sewing table for the two years I took a break from sewing. 

Since then, my health has improved, I finally let go of my quilting hangups and decided I was just going to quilt it free from templates and just have fun. I'm more than a bit rusty so it started out rough.

But now I'm more into it and the middle is over half quilted.


It still doesn't look like great quilting and I don't really like the texture. I wish I just did wavy lines instead of these bead looking things but I wouldn't have found that out just letting it sit on my table. I even have the binding all ready to go when I'm done.

I really need to work on lighting my pictures better or take them outside on a nice day. The top picture was done today outside and the others were taken quickly inside and edited.