Jen's Quilts

  As mentioned at the end of my log cabin post a few months back, I quite enjoyed doing a less complicated quilt for a change, i.e. one with nothing but squares and rectangles.  And I was quite keen to use up a half layer cake of paisley fabric squares that I think I received after one of mum or grandma's trips to the US at some point. Given I only had 20 10-inch squares, (of 10 different fabrics), it took a long time to figure out what quilt pattern I was going to make with them.  For a while I thought I had settled on a smaller version of a jacobs ladder or similar, until I redid the maths and realised the amount of fabric I had was not going to work out.  Eventually, and around the time I was doing the log cabin, I found the Log CATin pattern by AGF Studio .  It was basically a half log cabin block, but cleverly cut the same way from both a print and a plain 10-inch square, so that you ended up with two blocks that were the inverse of each other.  But ...

  I've had a charm pack from Laundry Basket Quilts lying around for a while that I wasn't 100% sure what to do with.  I was interested in the Oh My Stars pattern by Pat Sloan, but that took two charm packs.  So when she showed a version that took one pack, I figured that was what I would do. Looking through my fabric stash, I found some coordinating fabric I had for a while, and some other fabric I'd picked up at a destash last year. So I got to it, arranging the charm squares on the floor near the sewing machine in an order I liked, and sewing them back together as soon as I could before the cat rearranged them. The centre of the top was together pretty quickly, but then I packed it away for a bit while I worked on something else. I pulled it out again later to put on the borders, but then packed it up again. When it was finally time to think about quilting, I decided to get a bit experimental. I'd seen a YouTube video about glue basting a quilt instead of pinning and ...

  I found myself wanting to make a quilt for a particular reason, and it didn't take long to decide that I wanted to make a log cabin quilt out of a brown batik jelly roll I had.  I had thought I was going to use the jelly roll to make the New Year's Star , but this seemed like a better use for it.  I had a look at a couple of patterns for making log cabin blocks out of jelly rolls, particularly this one by Carol Thelen which made 10" finished blocks, but ultimately I decided I liked Donna Jordan's version better, which made 14" finished blocks.  This quilt used the majority of a jelly roll, and while I didn't mind the size, I wanted to do it a bit differently.  Instead of the 3 x 4 block setting with borders, wanted to do a 4 x 5 block setting with no borders.    This would give me a slightly smaller quilt which was fine by me.  But it would also require more fabric than was available in one jelly roll.  It was time to do some maths. I fig...

I found myself in possession of a few layer cakes at some point, and had no idea what to do with them until I saw this ocean waves pattern using 10 inch squares.  I knew straight away that I wanted to use a red and beige layer cake to make the pattern, and soon found a plain cream background to use with it.   That was a long time ago.  A couple of years maybe?  Other than the other quilts I was working on at the time, the major hurdle I had in getting this particular quilt started was the thought of the eight at a time half square triangles that would be required.  Usually I don't mind half square triangles.  But the thought of sewing 40 x eight at a time half square triangles, and then ironing and trimming to size the resulting 320 block parts, was definitely something I wasn't looking forward to.   I divided the layer cake into dark reds, medium/light reds, medium beiges and pale red/beiges to get the particular colour effect I was after....