Jen's Quilts

  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....