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....

I finished a fair few quilts late last year, and in the first half of this year.  But then stuff happened.  Some of which was moving house and involved packing up all the sewing gear for a number of weeks.  The new place has a nice sewing space, and while it is not fully set up, I have finally been able to get back to quilting. Before the whole move thing, I had started another blue and orange quilt, though nowhere as complicated and time consuming as the last one .  I had a half jelly roll of assorted orange prints, and decided to make the Kisses Quilt Pattern by SewCanShe .  Given all the orange / yellow strips were patterned and quite bright, I decided to go with a plain blue background. The strips were cut, and the blocks went together very easy (though those pinked edges on the orange pieces were a pain sometimes).  I spent a fair while laying out the blocks and rearranging in order to avoid having the same fabric in close proximity in different blocks...

  I look back over the number of quilts I've finished over the past year or so, and it is a lot.  But I have actually not started many.  There is a jelly roll quilt I started and completed last year, and I am working on a simple blue and orange number, but that is about it.  The rest have been finishes, and this is one of them.  I started working on it when I saw a block of the month quilt series in the Quiltmaker magazine .  A series of blocks was published in the magazine over 12 months, and looking at month number 1, I was keen to get started.  That was 18 months ago. I really enjoyed making the different blocks as they were released every couple of months, and after 12 months was keen to see what the final layout was going to look like and how all the different sized blocks were going to fit together.  However, when final layout was released, I didn't really like it.  If you have a look at the pattern in the link above, you will see that ...

Short one this time - but another finish for the year.  I got the pinwheel hexagon blocks from Grandma last year, and it didn't take long to figure out what sort of background fabric to add to them.  But they then sat there for a while until I figured out what to do with them.  The twenty blocks didn't quite make a quilt size I wanted, and I didn't want to have a huge border.  I'm not sure what made me think of it, but I decided to add a blank block into each row, and quilt it with the same pinwheel pattern as the other blocks. As a lot of ruler work was involved for the pinwheels, I quilted each of the rows separately, then joined them together with the strip in between.  The borders were added later, and then some simple echoing around the blocks with the walking foot. So that is two finishes for the year, and no starts.  I had to fix that last night by cutting pieces for a new quilt using a half jelly roll and background fabric, but I am also still keen ...