Spring Log Cabin at the Beach

Several days of vacation gave me a chance to finish the quilt.  Huzzah!  Most evenings this week were spent hand-stitching the binding.  I'm getting old... I needed glasses to work on it. 


I finally found some backing material I liked at the Franklin Mills store.  Not what I had expected, but it spoke to me:

Beach gear?  For a fall baby?  Well, I heard about her birth at the Cape, so I suspect that's why I latched onto the seaside theme.


I wasn't too sure about the color scheme at some point, but now that its done, I'm rather liking it.  I hope Mallory likes it, too.  Its certainly a lot brighter than my last baby quilt.

My last fun step:  The label.  I love Printed Treasures for making quilt labels.  So much easier than trying to write it all by hand.  And I don't have to worry about scrawling print or having to start all over again when I misspell something.  I love that I can pull in one of the background colors or material and work from that.  The only drawback is, its tough to sew through by hand. 

Welcome to the world, Mallory.  I hope you have a wonderful life.

New Sewing Project: Log Cabin Quilt

After a long dry spell of no sewing, I have such a backlog of projects that I've needed to dust off my sewing machine and get to work.

I have never done a log cabin quilt before.  Not that I've done a ton of quilts, but they've almost all been some variation of 9-patch.   I figured a baby quilt would be a perfect place to start.  Something small and simple.

I went through my scraps, and green kept speaking to me.  I originally thought green and yellow, but for whatever reason when I went to buy the rest of the material, I latched onto pink.  Bright pink, at that.  Not what I expected.  But that's the way it usually is with me: the quilts take on a life of their own.  I've learned to go with the flow.

The day after buying the material, I finally realized *why* I had this affinity for the color combo of bright pink and green:

Hmmm... something familiar about that top table runner....


I discovered, after I had cut all the material and sewed up the blocks that the blocks are predominantly what the second color is.  Hadn't really thought about that when I arbitrarily chose which color was "first."  So, this is a green quilt with pink, instead of the other way around.  Or evenly (which is what I thought it would be).  I mean, duh.  That should have been obvious when I was calculating yardage -- I needed more green than pink.  I realize now, I could have sewn the log cabins a little differently, and the colors would have been more even.

This has been an up-and-down project.  I despaired when I ran out of old material because I miscalculated (which I *always* do, even when I calculate twice), and managed to luck out and found a bolt of it in the discontinued shelves. Woot!  Then as I started cutting the material I feared that the colors were so eye-poppingly strong that people would run screaming from the quilt.  It has taken me forever to get this far.  But now that I've got the main portion sewn together, its not that bad!

Now if I can only find some backing and hope I didn't mis-measure the binding length!