In my recent post where I shared my quilt plans for the year I mentioned my ‘stretch’ project to complete a quilt from the test blocks from Sherri from A Quilting Life’s mystery block a month quilt. And in fairness the January block was super cute and helped the idea to form. As I said I don’t know if I’ll manage it, but then again I won’t know unless I try will I…
My third donation quilt
I’ve named this one the log cabin log cabin quilt - a simple play on words that never fails to make me smile - with a little house in the middle there really was no other name for it. For non-quilters the pattern surrounding the central house is known as a log cabin block, traditionally with half using dark fabrics and the other half using light fabrics. Even from the start, when I pulled these orange and green fabrics from my stash it made me smile.
The benefits of doing test blocks was immediately apparent, as I lost the roof point in my first block (the alphabet house, bottom left in the image above), but I worked out what I’d done wrong and corrected that for the other three blocks. So for that alone it was worth doing - and knowing how to avoid that particular mishap in my own block of the month.
I started adding the log cabin borders, which when complete means the blocks measure 18 inches, and while there’s just four blocks they are a similar size to the previous quilts I’m donating. I needed to stop and reconsider my options as I’d miscalculated how much of the plain peach material I’d need, and how much I had. Which long story short, wasn’t enough for the remaining two blocks.
I thought about purchasing a small amount of a similar coloured fabric for continuity, but this went against my plan to use materials from my stash - and as you can see, I opted to use more of the alphabet fabric in its place. And then I needed to stop again, as I happily added the white and grey flowery fabric to the dark section instead of the light borders.
Some unpicking was required!
But I was soon back on track and ready to join the blocks and add the borders - you’d never know I’d run out of peach would you?
Around this time I took delivery of my new sewing machine, so this quilt was put to one side while I got used to that - but now it’s finished, and finished using my new machine - and I couldn’t be happier.
Some of the fabrics in this quilt I’ve had for a long time, and some are pre-loved fabrics from old clothes and even old curtains - but I’m glad they worked so well together and have this new lease of life. I’ve used the orange squared fabric (which was old curtains - you may recognise it as I also made myself a bag using this material last summer)
You can see my other quilts which I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets, including those that are part of this ‘stretch’ project in earlier posts. I’m aiming to publish an update on my progress in the last week of each month for the remainder of 2025.