First Annual Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is the quilt I was hoping to enter in the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show this year. It doesn't look like I'll get to go at all, but they do it every year and I'll be there next year and the year after that. And this is as good a chance as any to show off what I made my grandma for Christmas.



I had a very strong bias against log cabin quilts, started by a quilt shop owner who answered my question about another pattern by telling me that I couldn't make a quilt until I took a class and everyone had to make a log cabin quilt as their first one. I really don't like being told what I can and can't make.

Quite a few years later, I'd made a few quilts and still never taken a class or intended to ever make a log cabin. My eleven year old daughter had made one. My mother had made one. And although they now don't remember it, they both told me that they'd decided you couldn't be a real quilter until you did a log cabin.

My best friend was in the middle of her own log cabin quilt using the Quilt in a Day book and I was talking her through it over the phone. The more I looked at the pattern and saw how quickly hers was coming together, the more it started to seem like a log cabin would be an perfect way to make the dinosaur quilt that I'd bought fabric for when Heath was a baby. So I did.

And then I saw a picture of a scrappy log cabin. Thin little strips of fabric. Lots and lots of them, in hundreds of different colors and prints. THAT was the log cabin I wanted to make. So I started cutting and sewing and the more strips I cut and sewed together, the more I fell in love with my quilt.

In mid-November I showed my grandma, who doesn't quilt but is the source of most of my scraps, a picture of my half-finished quilt. She really liked it, and I decided that I had to give her a quilt for Christmas, and it had to be a log cabin, but I didn't want to give up my own.

So I started a second one and somehow got it quilted and bound in time for Christmas eve. I'd thought about finishing mine for her and then starting a second one after the holidays were over and I wouldn't have to rush, but I just couldn't bring myself to give it up. So I pieced another thirty-five blocks.

The weather turned nasty and I wound up venturing out onto icier roads than I've ever even dreamed of driving on to get batting and backing. I ripped out more machine quilting than I left in. The weather got worse, and it didn't look like we'd see Grandma or anyone else on Christmas day. And I got it done. And the weather cleared up in time for Christmas dinner.

By the time I got both tops done, I was so burned out on thin little strips that I still haven't quilted my own log cabin top, but I'm so glad I made the twin quilts.
I'm even gearing up to cut more 1 1/2" strips of lights and darks so I can make a scrappy pineapple and a courthouse steps.

This one is mine --



Park City Girl is hosting a Spring 2009 Quilt Festival -- go check out the other quilts!