Quarter Reunion

I'm linking to Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  

Thank you Amy for sharing your talents with us, enabling us to share ours.  I first stumbled onto your festival in the fall of 2009,  just as I was starting to quilt.  The festival had just occurred.  I was so moved by it, that I quickly decided that I wanted to be a part of it.  It became my motivation as an early quilter.

I've come a long way since that first quilt.  I'm so glad that I started quilting in this extraordinary age of electronics, I would not have had the patience to lug a machine around for classes.  Google blogs from the comfort of my own home have been my classroom.  My home has become a quilter's haven, with rooms and closets adapting to my new found addiction.  My good husband thought that after the experience of that first quilt, that we were going to have our house back again, that everything was going to be put away . . . poor thing.  He has learned much patience :)

I'm so excited to share "Quarter Reunion" with you.  Thoughts of this quilt have been rolling around in my head since last summer.  I started it in the fall, but other quilts seemed to push their way to the front of the line.  The size even changed at one point. 

Measuring at 84" square, this quilt fits a double or queen bed as a comforter.

Surprise!  For my fabric I chose Reunion by Sweetwater for Moda.

Stats:

84" x 84"  - washed

25 - 8.5" blocks sashed with 4" kona bone.

Fabric is 1 Reunion jellyroll and 5 yds kona bone for sashing.

Back is 6 yds kona bone and left-overs.

Batting is Fairfield Nature-Fil, 50% bamboo 50% cotton.

Quilting is organic straight line.

1.25 yds fabric for bias binding.

Quarter Log Cabin Tutorial:

Cut 7 - 4" squares for block center.

Follow the instructions from this blog post to create a scrappy log cabin block.  Basically you just keep adding another random strip onto the next side.   Sometimes I carried the fabric on to the next side for a nice affect.

Continue adding logs until you have added 4 logs past the center square, per side.

Quarter the log cabin block.  You should now have 28 new blocks.

Add 4 inch sashing on each side of 25 blocks with kona bone.  (Keep the 3 extra blocks for your backing).

Lay out blocks and arrange randomly.  Sew blocks together, 5 across, 5 down. 

Create backing.

Quilt as desired.

Tallgrass Prairie Studio has a nice organic line quilting tutorial in this post.

I've had some questions about the HQ Sweet sixteen.  I'll write up a post on it soon.

At the bottom, I quilted:  

"A pebble held close to the eye appears to be a gigantic obstacle.  Cast on the ground, it is seen in perspective."

Unfortunately, it takes us years of painful experiences to learn this concept.  The trick is to learn patience, and not act irrationally until we are ready to cast our trial down, and see it with life's big picture.

Circle back around to the Blog Festival to see the other entries.