Quilts 75 & 76: Christmas Table Runners

Victorian Textiles' jelly roll packs are just fabulous - and I can't resist their Christmas packs!

I pulled apart the package and separated the strips into (from the top down in the photo below) gold, green, red, cream, and "multi" prints, just so I could have a good idea of how many prints there were with those predominant colours.
 
I cut out a 10" square block for the center of the runner (in the photo below, the green square to the left of the strips), then selected the 8 jelly roll strips I wanted in the runner - and cut out 16 squares of 2 1/2" to make the joining pieces along the runner.

I then cut the strips down to 10" lengths -

In the photo below, you can see how I arranged the strips and squares to create the table runner.  This runner has a green-and-metallic-gold fabric in the center.  The other has the same fabric in red as the center.

The last time I did one of these runners, I meticulously trimmed away the "points" left after joining the strips together at an angle.  It wasn't until after I'd already finished the quilting that it occurred to me doing that was overkill.  All I really had to do was baste along the edge of the runner (as you see me doing in the photo below), and leave the "tip trimming" to when I'd cut the runner away from the excess after quilting. 

The quilting on these two is very simple - just free motion "loop-d-loops" in dark green thread.  The backing is plain unbleached homespun - nothing fancy, really, but even so, the stitching looks good on the back (not that anybody's ever going to really look at it).

One thing I did as an experiment (on the table runner with the red center) was quilting the ends of the runner, but leaving the large center square without quilting.  I was just curious how it would look.  Well... it looked AWFUL once I pulled it off the longarm!  Just awful.

But no worries there, all I had to do was fold the ends down and stretch it on the frame with the clamps - and I gently pinned just middle of the sides to the leader cloths (as shown below), and was able to go back and add the needed quilting into that large red center square.

The finished size on both tablerunners is 57" x 12".  I bound each runner with the same fabric I used for the large center squares in each one.  Unfortunately, by the time I got the projects done, I was in a rush to prepare for my trip to the US - and the runners were gifts for family there.  In my haste, I managed to forget to take a photo of the finished quilts!