Vol 2 - Project 5 - Cabin in the Cotton - Julie's Quilt

Hello again.  I'm back from the mainland after doing the grandma thing, helping out the new Mum & Dad.  Milly is lovely and I know she'll be much changed when I next see her, which won't be until early next year.

Work has begun on the next quilt in the book - a log cabin design.



Its a very pretty quilt and I really like the 1930's prints used here.  This quilt is a lesson in adding sashing between the blocks - something not tackled yet on any of the previous projects.

As it's my intention to make all the quilts from all 6 of the books (notice the word "intention"), I'm going to end up with a load of quilts, far more than I can possibly use.  So I've asked a few friends to choose a design from Vol 2 and to choose fabrics from my stash and I will gift them the quilt when it's all done.  Julie has chosen this one.

FABRIC SELECTION
I have a nice little selection of 1930's prints but Julie decided these were not her style.  She wanted something a bit brighter and definitely not a white background.  This is what she chose.........

Julie's Fabrics

Most of the fabrics are batiks, with a few hand-dyes thrown in.  We pondered the sashing material for a while, trying out creams, yellows, greys and tans, but as soon as I threw down the black, she was sold!  The brights really glow against the dark background - I think these fabrics are going to look fabulous.

This quilt is made from Fat Quarters and the pattern calls for 13 different fabrics - you may notice Julie's selection has 19 fabrics  ???  There are 2 reasons for this, the first is that we want to make the quilt larger.  It's crib size but a lap quilt would be more useful, so I'm going to add 4 extra blocks and make the quilt square.  The second reason is that Julie had such a hard time culling the selection!  I pulled out all the batik FQ's I had in my stash, plus a few others to synchronise the colours and Julie was supposed to choose from these.  She managed to reject only 1 FQ - lol!

I think the hardest part for me in putting this quilt together will be the random selection.  The idea is to cut all the strips, put them in a box and pull them out at random - whatever comes out of the box is the next log to be sewn.  The control freak in me is going to have a problem with this!  For this reason, Julie had to make sure all the fabrics would work together, regardless of which colour is put next to another.

FABRIC CALCULATIONS
Because I want to change the size of this quilt, I have to do some extra work.  Harriet very kindly explains exactly how many strips to cut for each of the patterns, but this is supposed to be a tutorial, not a pattern book, so all the formulas for doing the calculations are also explained and included.  To work out how many strips to cut from each of the FQ's I needed to go back to Vol 1 and refer to the very handy chart which details working out yardage for log cabin quilts.

Even with the chart, I needed to do some adjustments i.e. working with FQ's instead of yardage and calculating in the 4 extra blocks and 5 extra fabrics.  I'm never very trusting of my mathematical abilities and the whole project could go horribly wrong - but the only real way to learn is to do, so I'm giving it a shot.

ONE OTHER THING..........
Milly enjoying her new quilt and her new Grandma!