Light-and-Dark Log Cabin

I started a light-and-dark log cabin in early May, following a huge fabric-buying spree at Keepsake and Marden's (a discount store in Sanford, Maine. Don't ask, just go.). I described the motivation and process for the quilt in this post, but it's been so long that I'll go over it again. I felt a sudden compulsion to attempt to use up my (albeit meager) scrap stash and make a log cabin quilt when I returned from the NEMQG retreat. I cut up all the scraps I had into 2" strips (for 1.5" finished "logs") and pulled out a stack of 2.5" squares that I already had sitting around from a failed project that I never posted about. (Don't you love when that happens?) I cut three yards of KF Shot Cotton in Blush into 2" strips, calculated some basic measurements, and went to town sewing a mockup block. Happy with the first attempt, I chain-pieced 48 more.

...not so fast, of course. There was a period during block construction where I just could not believe that the project would ever be finished. You know the stage: when you realize you're only about 60% of the way through the blocks and you find it all but impossible to imagine that your hours of slaving away at the machine have resulted in such a meager pile of fabric. "How many more seasons of Will & Grace must I endure before I finish this thing," you ask yourself as you try to remove the chocolate stain you left on the last block you ironed.

Anyway, the blocks took me more than a month to sew. Once I finished them, I realized that the blocks together measured nearly twice the size of my entire living room. I considered renting space in the library or resorting to other bizarre venues for laying out my blocks. Luckily, my friends Rachel and Piper very generously agreed to allow me to use their dining room, even going so far as to remove almost all of the furniture in the room to accommodate this behemoth.

I'm so glad I went to a friend's house at this stage because the diamond layout I had originally planned just wasn't working, and if I hadn't had another person there to corroborate my negative feelings about my chosen layout, I might have plowed ahead. But neither of us liked it, and finally I settled on a variation of the "barn raising" variation: an off-center diamond.

I am just so happy with the layout we chose, the way the fabrics are working together...everything, really! It's all solids except for one old gingham shirt (which you can't tell is a print unless you are six inches away from it) and a few strips of Yuwa Honeycomb in black. The top measures about 95" square.

Once I had the layout set, I sewed the top together within a couple of days. I also whipped up a backing using Kona Light Jade and as many scraps from the project as possible. I have to admit that I can't conjure up the love for pieced backs that most quilters seem to possess. I think I'm going to start using fat backs, even though the fabric selection leaves much to be desired. By the time I've finished a quilt top, I'm ready to quilt it, bind it, and enjoy it. Sewing a backing just frustrates me. I have "sew-cried" my way through many a pieced back. Now I just need to find an inexpensive source for fat backs...and, of course, quilt this monster!

I hope you all had a productive weekend!

Mountains Beyond Mountains (with apologies for harsh lighting conditions)

Sewing has been on the backburner over here lately, owing to my incredibly hectic work schedule, but I sewed the final seam on this quilt top yesterday during my lunch break, and I am JUST. SO. HAPPY with it.

When I finally stepped away from the completed top and stared at it spread across the living room sofa, I felt like I had just scaled a mountain. Which doesn't really seem to require much, if you've been watching the Discovery show Everest, where people with terrifyingly little climbing experience (or common sense) pay vast sums of money to scale the mountain with the help of 43 sherpas and a team of yaks.

But back to the quilt.

There are one thousand and thirty-five triangles in this behemoth, which measures an acceptable 73" square. Not as big as I'd like, but still a usable size. This quilt would definitely not win any quilt shows; there are three or four (or ten) areas where the points just didn't match up, but the Quilt Police don't live near me, so I think I'll be okay.

Quilting, as always, is stalled...this time because the backing fabric I bought from Fabric.com (in my last ever purchase from them as their customer service is abominable) just doesn't seem to be very high-quality, and I would hate to ruin a quilt I love so very much with a poor-quality backing fabric. I know it will destroy my machine to do this, but I really want to use Minky on the back...is that so bad?

Have a great weekend, everyone! I hope you'll all spend it sewing. I'm spending it making room in my sewing area for my new sewing table...

Stripes & Solids--the top and back

Just when I thought I would never have the chance to photograph this lovely top and back, we had a sunny evening in Boston and Amy left work early to help me hang them on the fence in the courtyard of my building (definitely a two-person job).

This is the second in my Amish quilts series. It was inspired by a quilt in an excellent book on Amish quilts, Amish Abstractions (you can see my review of it in that link. I'm trying write enough reviews to become a member of Amazon Vine so I'll get free quilt books. So far, I've written two).

Attaching the large borders to the center square in my incredibly small sewing area was difficult, but I persevered and am just so happy with the result. All I did was cut down the middle of several yards of fabric and attach it, so the borders are 22" and the center square is 44", for a grand total of 88" square.

Constructing the back was much more frustrating than piecing the top. As I said in my earlier post about this quilt, I got a little rotary-cutter happy and cut strips from three yards of fabric for the top. Of course, you don't use that much fabric in a 44" square, so I had quite a few leftover strips from which to piece the back.

Sewing them up was a complete nightmare. There are two parts of quilting I don't like: cutting (in general) and sewing long, thin strips. I bought an Accuquilt to deal with the first issue, but the second is unavoidable. So I created a battle plan and plunged in. Twenty 1"x88" strips later, I was finished...but I never wanted to sew a strip again. When we were photographing this yesterday, Amy (unprompted) said it looked hard to sew so many thin strips together. I informed her I was still having flashbacks about it. Luckily, I had had three seasons of Vicar of Dibley to get me through. Someone tell me I'm not the only person besides my grandmother who is obsessed with that show.

I do plan to quilt this on my own machine (gasp) and am actually in the process of looking for a new sewing table right now to make the quilting process easier on myself (in general...not just for this quilt!). I don't know if quilting it myself is crazy or not. Of course, I am considering going back to Laurena's to use her Sweet Sixteen because she has (much) more table space. But it's also free to do it at my own apartment.

I think I want to quilt it with concentric circles. I was planning to do a diagonal grid, which I do enjoy, but I've seen several quilts quilted that way in blogland over the last few weeks, and I'm already starting to get a little tired of the pattern.

I'm in Philly for the weekend doing something very exciting with a special friend of mine! I can't wait to tell you all about it when I return. Happy sewing!

WIP Wednesday...with images this time!

Greetings from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I am visiting law schools/quilt shops for the next several days! I arrived this morning, dropped my belongings off at my hotel (chucked my bag into my room), and immediately went to (ran and then sped to) what I had heard was the mecca of quilt stores: Ann Arbor Sewing Center. To give you an idea of its size and selection, the store has a 32' long wall for thread alone. AASC is about twice the size of the house I grew up in, with a room for just notions that is larger than my current apartment, though that probably doesn't say much to those of you who have been there. I actually managed to leave without breaking the $100 mark, but only because they couldn't guarantee that a sewing machine accessory I wanted would actually fit my machine. Thank God for small miracles. I'd rather buy fabric than eat, but I have to impose limits on myself once in a while (or have them imposed on me...whatever).

Before I left, I did take pictures of my Ocean Waves quilt, on which I am slowly and steadily progressing. I love this quilt, but I can only do so much at once. Each square has almost 150 triangles. It can be a bit overwhelming, and the last block I did was completely disastrous (at least in terms of my ability to match points). Some of my cut triangles must have been very misshapen. It's a feat of willpower to cut ~1,000 triangles over two nights (so much so that I just had to buy an Accuquilt so it would NEVER, EVER happen again).

The as-yet-unnamed Ocean Waves quilt is the first quilt in a series I am doing of Amish-inspired quilts. The Ocean Waves pattern was very common among the Amish from the late 1800s to early 1900s, though I'm not sure if it is anymore. I developed the "pattern" for my quilt myself, and although the blocks are slightly larger than I expected (and larger than how they usually appear in Amish quilts), they are not larger than I generally prefer. I think they're very bold and graphic, which is exactly the look I wanted to attain. The Amish almost never used whites or beiges for their background fabrics, but I felt that my fabric choices were so...hmm, in-your-face?...that they required a "blank" space for the background.

Hopefully sewing them together and matching all of those points will not be horribly traumatic. I have four blocks so far, and I only need one more full block and four half-blocks to finish the top. The blocks are ~24" across when square, but ~36" across on point (which is how they are assembled), so it will be a ~70x70 finished quilt. Not quite as big as I'd like, but you can't have everything.

I will list the fabrics again once I finish the top, but I'm posting them here now so I don't forget. The triangle/focus fabrics are: Amy Butler Solids in Periwinkle; FSDS in Grape, Red, and Olive; Moda Bella Solids in Turquoise; Kona in Cerise, Rose, and Violet; and Quilter's Linen in Orange. The center square/background fabric is Moda Bella Solids in Antique White. It is my understanding that Moda no longer produces this color, and now I must obsessively hoard the 3.5 yards that remain (I reallyreallyreally love this neutral).

Back soon with photos of my recent completed quilt top and back!

Stripes and solids!

I have a new quilt in progress, this time for my brother Taylor (forget what I said about gift quilts, heh heh...he's been begging for one, and this is for Christmas). The inspiration for this quilt came from one of my favorite Amish quilt books.

This is the 44" center square of what will, I hope, become a quilt of 84"-86" square.

I cut out 8.5" square pieces of paper and string-pieced 1.5" strips of three color ranges of fabric (green, cerulean, and plum) with one gray and one black fabric. This 44" square went through several iterations on top of my duvet cover (downside of paper-piecing: paper doesn't stick to my makeshift design wall).

The gray is FSDS Dogwood (which looks remarkably similar to Ash...I had to sub Ash in one of the blocks because I ran out of Dogwood, and now I can't even remember which one it was), and the black is Moda Bella Solids in Black. I am hoping to find a richer black for the border. The colored strips are FSDS Emerald, Hummingbird Blue, Red Plum, and Oriental Blue; and Kona Cactus, Plumberry, and Pacific.

Naturally, I got slice-happy with my rotary cutter because I was distracted by the television, cut about three times as many strips as I needed, and now have a bunch of 1.5"x 44" strips I must use to piece the back.

I have big plans for how I'm going to quilt it, which do not involve the longarm...I've discovered I don't love it as much as I thought I would! Not being able to see the quilt while you're working on it is so frustrating.

I hope to have a completed top to show you soon. It will be my first completed quilt top since October or November, eeek!