Log Cabin Quilt

My Grandmother passed away a couple of years ago now and I inherited several unfinished quilt tops from her. I am not really much of a quilter so I've been a bit afraid to do anything with the quilts. I don't want to ruin them. But having them sitting around taking up space in my craft room isn't a good use of them either, so in November I got up the gumption to actually work on one of them.

I started with my least favorite (although I still like it) of the tops, it a log cabin style made from truly awful double knit polyester. The fabric just screams 70s, but I do really like the colors. I felt like the quilt was busy enough on it's own that I didn't want to distract from it with quilting, so I decided to do a tied quilt instead.

I've never actually made a tied quilt before though so I enlisted my mother-in-law to help me out.

On our last visit to her house I brought the backing, some poly batting and the top and laid is all out and pinned it on her dining room table.

She has awesome curved safety pins that made the whole process much easier. 

And then we started tying it all together. The poly batting that I chose required tying or quilting every 5 inches and naturally I had 6 inches in between the center of each square so I decided to tie in the center of each little red square as well as the corners between each block. 

Although it didn't take anywhere near as long as quilting it would have, it was still a fairly time consuming process. But I got it done. I bound the edge using white bias binding left over from my last quilt. 

Ta-Da! It's a twin size quilt so it doesn't really fit on my bed. As I get more of these tops quilted I would like to display them on a quilt ladder or something like that. Most of them are twin sized and thus not going to work on my queen size bed, but I don't mind. It's a nice way for me to stay close to my grandmother.

Pillows

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote anything. I've been super busy but not getting a lot of sewing done recently. I just finished moving and I am very happy to say that I now have an entire room for my crafting supplies. Living the dream y'all! Tomorrow I will be reveling in that craft room sewing curtains for the house. In the mean time the only thing that I have sewed in the last two months that I haven't written about yet was new pillows for the bed to go with the beautiful headboard that my husband made for us.

Isn't it a great headboard? My husband is just the most wonderfully talented person on the planet!!!

But I was going to talk about the pillows. I'm pretty happy with them. The fabric came out of my stash. I already had the pillow forms but the old cases on them did not look good with our new quilt. The white fabric came from my grandmother originally and has a wonderful white on white check pattern. I like the nice subtle visual interest. The longer middle pillow is a blue and white check that one of my knitting friends gave me when they moved. And the small pillow is the same floral cotton left over from my self drafted a-line skirt. It is also in a couple of the triangles in the quilt. I feel like it all ties together pretty nicely.

So, one of my personal preferences for pillows is that they not have visible seams. For these I did French seams on two long and one short side (because even though they will never be visible I wanted them to be neat and tidy seams). For the remaining side I hand-stitched the pillow shut using what I think is most often called a ladder stitch. 

I like it because you work from the outside but it is invisible. 

I was going to post a little photo tutorial about how I did it, but apparently my phone doesn't feel like cooperating because I can't get the photos to load. Oh well. They were not good pictures anyway. It's really hard to take a picture while also using both hands to sew. One of these days I might have to invest in a tri-pod and a video camera instead.