Sod Cabin Quilt

  • February 10, 2011 9:37 pm

2.5" x 44" strips of fabric

Here is the fabric I used for a quilt I made for Ruben & Maria (my older brother and his wife) for Christmas. This quilt started with the dark brown sprout fabric. It is actually called Maple from the Timber line by Jessica Levitt. They are maple seed pods, but to me they looked like a little plot of soil with some sprouts coming out! When I saw this fabric I bought a couple yards knowing that I had to make something for Ruben & Maria. They are organic sustainable landscapers in Eugene, Oregon and kinda do with plants what I do with fabric (talk to it nicely and then cut it into submission).

I knew I wanted to see the sprout fabric in rows, so I decided to use a Log Cabin quilt block. Traditionally log cabin quilt blocks have a red center to represent the hearth of a home, but I was really in love with the blue fabric you see above that I had bought on a whim at Stitch Lab. It is a very girly rose print  by Jennifer Paganelli from her Flower Power line for Freespirit. I bought it because I was in love with the aqua colors, but it hung around in my fabric stash for a while being decidedly too girly. From there I stuffed it full of Tula Pink fabric, which I have been doing a lot lately.. I knew Maria liked this lacy butterfly print (the light brown) because she had actually picked out a fat quarter cut of this in another color when we found ourselves in a mad dash to buy fabrics once in Frederisckburg, TX.

Once I had a couple fabrics that I knew for sure I wanted to use filling in the rest went pretty quick, although knowing that I had at least a couple yards of each was part of the decision making process. I sewed a couple test blocks and gave the OK to cut up all the fabric into the 2.5 inch strips you see above. This part can be hard if you don’t have a plan! A lot of time in quilting can be spent before you even touch the fabric- just thinking about what you are going to do with the fabric and how you need to cut it. So after cutting came a lot of time sitting at my machine with my iron ready and waiting right next to me- stitching a few rows and then ironing the seams flat. Every time you add a ‘log’ around the center you have to iron it flat before adding the next log, lest your structure be wonky. Sometimes when wonkiness or color is not a problem you can speed through everything I just said and just cut up the first fabric you can find quickly and sew it together with maybe some scraps. Check out this Wonky LogCabin Tutorial from Tallgrass Prairie for a good view a the block making process.

Furrows

I got through making several blocks and stuck them up on the design wall to see where it was headed. I had planned on doing the rows design that you see above, but at this point I was somewhat disappointed that I hadn’t considered the contrast between the 2 brown fabrics to be too much. The dark brown was making this step effect instead of the straight rows I had expected. Time to re-arrange the blocks! One of the great things about the log cabin block is how versatile the layout can be:

grid

squares

plus medallion

sun medallion

This final layout is the one I ended up sticking with. I felt it took advantage of the dark brown structure the most. It also convinced me to keep the quilt square even though I had 3 extra blocks that I ended up not using. I sewed all these rows together and ironed it all one last time. I bought a few yards of espresso Kona Cotton, which is a nice dark brown, and I pieced together a scrappy strip of some of my favorite browns blues & greens to go down the center of the back. Then I made my quilt sandwich and stayed up late one night with Mum basting it with 200 safety pins. This time I used a method of basting that involved rolling the top and back onto separate boards and rolling them out as I got it pinned. This method worked really well except for the fact that Mum’s help was needed.

quilt ready for binding.. almost.

This quilt was pretty small – 60 x 60 inches so it wasn’t too hard to quilt on my machine. I bought a big spool of aqua thread (the last one was waiting for me at the Quilt Store!) and quilted in a simple diagonal pattern. I felt it needed additional quilting but at the time was thinking more aqua thread would be too much, so I went to another local quilt shop, Honey Bee and bought a big spool of dark brown thread to stitch in the ditch of the blocks.

The result is a lovely little quilt that Ruben & Maria were very pleased to receive!

detail of quilting

binding and quilting detail

I had enough of the aqua rose fabric left over that I decided it would be the perfect binding and I am soo glad I did. I think that may be my favorite part of this quilt!

embroidered label detail - Gina Pina 2010

Here is a shot of my name and the date that I embroidered on the back. I feel it is always important to label and date your work, even subtly. I do feel bad for that poor horse that got his head quilted through. The Heather Ross pony fabric up there is another one that we bought during our Fredericksburg  shopping spree! Also the snails above it Ruben & Maria bought from Spool in Portland, Oregon as a gift. There are always lots of little details like that hiding in quilts.

Sod Cabin quilt back

Here are Maria and Ruben holding up the little quilt! It was so nice to have them in Austin for Christmas. We only get to see them about once a year usually so we always try to make the most of it. This is the scrappy back I made. Another shout out to my sister Rebecca for helping me decide what to do there. I always like the back of quilts to be as cool as the front.

Sod Cabin quilt front

They may have to fight for space under this little quilt, but fortunately they have other handmade quilts from Maria’s family in Wyoming to keep them warm too. Quilts do take quite a bit of time and effort to make, but it really is the perfect gift because it is functional art that will last a lifetime that is full of love and personality! I want to find the time this year to make everyone in my immediate family a queen or king sized quilt. Hopefully I can manage to do that and also keep sewing enough to keep me fed!

Right now I am trying to combine my patchwork addiction with my bag making skills and have been working on some new designs and products that I hope to be photographing and offering online. Fortunately custom orders have been keeping me busy enough this winter, but unfortunately that means that my product stock is currently very low! I would love to get it back to craft show levels, but at the same time I love working on something that I know already has a home.

In the meantime, check out my flickr stream to see some fun quilt a long blocks I have been doing for the Bloggers Block A Palooza! It has been a nice challenge to get a couple mystery block designs to complete a week and then see how others have made the same block. The Flickr Pool is full of fun stuff!

Oz Logs Quilt

  • January 18, 2011 3:32 pm

I have fallen into a patchwork spiral. I can’t stop myself! Since the time I last posted I have finished 2 quilts. One of them was inspired by the Fat Quarterly Quilt Along. Fat Quarterly is an awesome group of quilters that have put together an internet magazine all about modern quilting.

One thing that is relatively new to the quilting world is “precuts”. Precuts are fabric that are pre-cut into specific pieces such as strips or squares and sold as a set with other pieces from the same designer or line of fabric. Basically, it is little pieces cut from a large goup of fabrics that all go together well. They are so popular and easy to use that even solid colors are being sold this way now. I don’t think quilters 100 years ago would even imagine such a thing, but today they are all the rage. If you thought rotary cutters were fast, well this is taking it to the next step!

There are tons of quilt books and patterns that are designed specifically to use with these precuts in mind. The Moda Bake Shop is a great example- Moda is the Queen of pre-cuts at the moment- coining popular names for them such as Jelly Roll’s (40 2.5″ strips rolled together) and Charm Packs (40 5″ squares). Click here for an illustration of precuts that Moda offers.

Oz Jelly Roll

This is the ‘before’ shot of my quilt. A Jelly Roll of Oz designed by Sanae for Moda. I purchased it somewhat on a whim because it was on sale and I was curious about these jelly rolls that everyone was going on about. I will be honest and say that I think these jelly rolls are beautiful AS IS. I could just have them all over the house as decoration. It did feel a little wrong when I unwrapped this. It also takes quite a bit of ironing before cutting. Nobody  had warned me about that.

I followed the cutting and piecing instructions from the Fat Quarterly blog, but deviated a little bit from the quilt top assembly opting to make mine square and double the fabric to make mine twice as big.  The cool thing about this being a quilt a long was that several folks around the internet were all making this quilt at the same time so we would all upload our progress shots to the FQ Flickr group. It is so interesting to see the same quilt made by so many different people! Everybody has their own little take on it and of course all of the different fabric choices made for some great variety.

Oz test layout on the design wall

Here are some cut pieces I started putting up on the design wall just to see how things would look. This is the moment I decided I wanted half of the quilt to be solids. I can’t stress how awesome and important having a design wall in the sewing studio is. Mine is not fancy at all; 6 yards of pure white cotton flannel tacked straight to the wall, but I use it constantly! I throw pieces up there and step back to the other side of the room to stare at it for a while.

I originally planned on grey or black, but on a whim tried cream and liked it the best. Seeing the empty blocks with white peeking through is what made me realize white centers would be a nice way to tie the quilt together and keep it from being too busy.

Here is where my favorite part of the whole quilting process comes in. I have everything cut, all I need to do is so sew ~150 blocks. It is great to be able to sit down at my sewing machine and stitch and stitch without having to think about anything else. A lot of the quilting process is very repetitive, but that can be relaxing. It was also nice to immediately have something I could work on when I had some spare time on my hands. Sewing together some pieces while I watched television in the living room at night could still make progress.

I chose to sew my blocks together randomly mixing all of the print fabrics around and even throwing in a couple different shades of Kona cream which not only made the whole process a lot easier, but I like the scrappy quality it gives the quilt.

quilt top as curtain

As the quilt top was coming along I started to wonder what I would use for the back of the quilt. I absolutely fell in love with the fabric as I was sewing it. I love seeing the same prints in different colors and trying to decide which was my favorite. Sewing the pieces together in a scrappy order led to nice surprises as they came together. I decided that I love Oz and the only perfect backing for the quilt would be to use more Oz! I found a shop online that had their Oz yardage on sale and put the project on hold while I waited for that to come in the mail. The shop mostly had the pink prints, which I did not want for the back so I didn’t exactly get to choose my favorites, but am happy with what I ended up with.

Kuma and the quilt back layout on the design wall

More Oz ended up going into the back of the quilt than the front!  Now I had the front & the back assembled and it was ready to make the fabric sandwich and get ready for the actual quilting of the quilt!

Graham helping hold down the quilt

This is when I had the quilt layers and batting spread out on the living room floor getting ready to baste it by safety pinning the hell out of it! All of the animals loved this step the most because they all got to parade all over it. I had to work quickly and do a lot of shoo-ing.

Then came the quilting. I bought a giant spool of cream thread and spent the better part of 2 days running this thing through my machine. This part is fun and scary. I can’t say enough how much I love my heavy Singer sewing machine that is set in a cabinet. I think that helps ease the troubles. I should have gotten a shot of the quilt on the sewing machine because it is truly a beautiful sight. I equated it to seeing my sewing machine all dressed up.

After washing, the new fabric gets nice and wrinkly

I chose to do all straight line quilting; 1/4 inch around each white square and 1/4 inch along each side of where the blocks are joined. About halfway through quilting I was asking myself why I chose to do so many lines, but there is no way I would have taken a seam ripper to it, so I just kept going. While quilting you really only need the small area right under and around the needle to be flat and the rest of the quilt is going to be crumpled up and shifted around like mad. I started all of my lines in the center and worked my way out to reduce shifting. Lots of people like to wear sticky gloves and push the quilt around from the top, but I tend to get my arms under the quilt and kind of pinch it from underneath and roll it on top of itself and grab it to move it around. For the most part my machine did most of the work and the feed dogs pulling the fabric kept it going. I just had to make sure the weight of the quilt hanging off the sides wasn’t pulling or tugging.

After quilting I must admit the quilt sat around for a while until I could get around to cutting, ironing and stitching on the binding. I changed my mind at the last second on which print I would use for the binding. I had originally planned on using the tiny black and cream polka dots, but after unfolding the fabric that I had bought I decided to save it for another project because it was too awesome to cut into tiny strips at the moment. I instead chose the small flower print called Dizzy that I had bought extra of after my sister expressed that it was her favorite.

Hand stitching on the binding is another one of my favorite parts, not only because it means I am in the home stretch and almost done, but because I am literally just sitting on the couch as I stitch. That is a little bit of why I almost felt guilty during this quilting process. No that is not a typo I said Guilty. Sometimes it would take over and instead of doing things I was supposed to be doing I would work on this quilt.  In my mind it did seem almost crazy to spend so much time sewing something that I wasn’t going to be selling. I got a lot of questions and who or what this quilt was for and never really had an answer. I just had to make one. Now I think I might need to make another one! Although this would match by bedroom perfectly I ended up giving it to my parents because they have been very supportive of my sewing business and the changes it has been going through this last year and not to mention they really love it!

Mom & Dad holding the Oz Logs quilt

They also earned it by going out on a cold windy winter day to help me take pictures of it! Now I am off to dream about my next quilt.. more on the second quilt I recently finished later.

xo gina pina