A New Bed Quilt

Late last year I promised my son, Matt, a new quilt for his bed. His current quilt was one of the very first I had ever made and had been seen much, much better days. Luckily, I had several log cabin blocks left over from a previous project (another bed quilt that I will write about some day if I can ever get a photo). These were all black/white and black/grey with a gold center, and as it turned out I had around 125 blocks. I had no idea I had so many.  I made them following the instructions from a book called A Log Cabin Notebook by Mary Ellen Hopkins. She used to own a shop in Santa Monica, California, but I don't think it's in business any longer. Sadly, many fine quilt shops have folded in this economy lately.

All together, the blocks looked pretty good. Here they are laid out on the living room floor. Each one is 6 inches square. The block sitting up in the right hand upper corner is a rogue block, which didn't quite follow the correct pattern. All of the strips are cut 1 1/4 inches so they finish at 7/8 inches wide. This definitely won't be a hand quilted quilt with all those seam allowances! I'll either machine quilt it myself or send it out.

 

This is an example of a black/grey block,

While this is one of the black/white blocks. They pretty much all have the same black/gold center. When I laid this quilt out on the floor I discovered that I only needed around 25 more blocks to make, which is pretty good for using up the fabrics lying about in my sewing room. It took only a day and a half to make up the rest of the blocks.

The big challenge is yet to come - sewing these all together and making the sides come out straight. I have to admit I'm not looking forward to that part of it. What will be really challenging is that the quilt is laid out on the living room floor, while the sewing machine is upstairs. So the big dilemma: do I painstaking label all the blocks, bring upstairs to sew and press, then downstairs again to check placement, or do I bring the sewing machine downstairs and set up on the newly refinished dining room table?

Wish me luck - this will definitely take a while. I can only do so much machine sewing before I really need to stop and go back to my embroidery for a while to "rest up" and get my mind back into gear. Since sewing blocks together is not exactly newsworthy, I may not post on this subject again until it is sewn together.