So I wanted to make a quilt. At first I was thinking of doing the rail fence pattern, but changed my mind to make a log cabin instead. I used the Jordan Fabrics Youtube Video to guide my strip dimensions.
This is the plan I used, the lights and darks are only an indication of which pieces I needed to cut
I used a combination of fat quarters and jelly rolls to cut out my pieces.
I started with 12 x dark 6.5” squares, then moved to the strips.
Dark strips
12 x 8.5”
12 x 10.5”
12 x 12.5”
12 x 14.5”
Light Strips
12 x 6.5”
12 x 8.5”
12 x 10.5”
12 x 12.5”
Cutting
With the pieces all cut out, now it was time to lay them out to figure out how I wanted it to look, and to make sure that any directional prints were correctly oriented.
One of the quilt layouts
Quilt pieced together
After many variations I settled on the order I wanted the pieces to flow. I tried my best to not have the darker like pieces butt up against each other.
With the pieces all laid out the way I wanted the final version to be, I labelled them in rows 1-4 and columns A-C. I picked up the pieces belonging to each section and kept them together, labelled A1 or B3, etc.
Piecing
Next up was piecing each section. This didn’t take too long. In two evenings I had all 12 major squares sewn up. I squared them all off to the same dimensions.
I stitched A, B, C one row at a time, and then stitched each row to the next, pressing the seams as I went
Basting
With the top layer all done and pressed, it was time to baste. Basting is temporarily stitching together material to keep it in place for other things to take place.
I laid out the base layer, face down. On top of it I laid down the wadding (soft stuffing to make the quilt fluffy), and on top of that I laid down the top layer (the pieced quilt). Quilt basting can be done with adhesive spray, pins, or hand-basting. I’m sure there’s more ways to do it, but I went with hand-basting. I used regular needle and thread and created large stitches capturing all three layers together.
Quilt hand-basted
Quilting
With the whole quilt basted, it was time to quilt it. The wadding used should indicate how closely together it needs to be quilted. I used a bamboo wadding that suggested quilting up to 8” apart.
Not being experienced in free motion quilting, and having a nice structured pattern, I decided to stitch in the ditch between each major square, and each central square in the piece. That was sufficient quilting based on the wadding instructions. In the future I will practice free motion quilting, or send it to someone with a long arm machine to be quilted because doing this on a dinky home machine is very difficult.
Binding
The whole quilt is quilted, the end is nigh! One of the last steps is squaring up the quilt. I had left a bit of excess batting and backing material. This needed to be trimmed and the entire quilt squared up.
I trimmed all the edges nice and clean, then zigzagged the edges for a clean finish (a serger would do this just as well, but I don’t have one so…).
I used bias binding to bind the edges of the quilt. First I roughly laid out the binding all the way around the quilt, making sure that no binding joins coincided with the quilt corners. I used Melanie Ham’s machine binding method to put the binding on and turn in the corners. On the backing of the quilt I lined up the binding edges to the quilt edges and sewed with a 1/4” seam allowance. Then I flipped the quilt to the front, folded over the binding to the front, making it nice and taut, and top stitched the binding down.
After washing it, the quilt was ready to use!