Scrappy Log Cabin - Finished!!

Finally I can share pictures of my Scrappy Log Cabin quilt! I finished it back in May, but this quilt is huge and I don't have anywhere to take pictures of something so big easily. No quilt-hanging-on-the-backyard-clothesline shot for me.

So, we took it to a local park for a special photo shoot.

That rather odd looking structure behind the quilt is a reproduction of a community bread oven from the time of the early French settlers in this area.

There are still lots of icebergs around, as you can see in the background.

All the fabrics in the quilt top are scraps, except for the sashing/borders and the yellow in the block centers and sashing cornerstones. Amazingly, my 1 1/2" strip container is still just as full as when I started piecing this. Do the scraps breed when we're not looking?

It took me a long time to quilt this, mostly because I kept starting (and finishing) other projects instead of working steadily on this one. It actually took about 16 months to finish just the quilting. The whole reason I started making this quilt, way back when, was to give myself a large project on which I could practice my free-motion quilting skills and it worked!

I started by stitching in the ditch around all the blocks and then I made the first attempt at a block. I hated it! There's not a line in there that's even close to straight, and I wasn't going for the organic look. I wasn't about to rip out all those stitches, but there was no way I was committing to doing 55 more blocks with a design that I hated.

Eventually I settled on spirals in all the blocks, except in each vertical row there would be one block with a different design. That way this first block wouldn't be the only odd one out and I could play around with a few other designs along the way. Whew, crisis averted! Some of these pictures are from the back of the quilt so the quilting shows up better.

Here are my favourites of the different designs.

Wavy cross-hatch

Pebbles

As for the spirals, did they ever improve between the first blocks and the last ones!

One of the earliest spiral blocks

One of the last spiral blocks.

Don't you just love when you can see that your quilting has improved?

I decided the sashing strips would be a great place to work on my feathers. After all, with something like 127 sashing strips, I was sure to figure out how to stitch them by the time I finished, right?

One of the first sashing feathers

One of the last sashing feathers

 I also did feathers in the border.

Because this quilt is so big, it's hard to get a good shot of the back that shows all the detail of the quilting.

 I used a Gutermann 100% cotton variegated thread for the quilting, but I won't be buying it again. It produced a crazy amount of lint and I had problems with breakage at times. I do love how it blends in with the mottled sashing/border fabric though.

When the quilting was finally finished, I dug out my 2 1/2" strips and pieced a scrappy binding. Then I did the binding entirely by machine, figuring that a practice quilt seemed an appropriate place to practice that new skill too. As a bonus, machine binding is lots faster than hand binding.

This quilt is now covering the bed in our spare room, making me happy each time I see it.

I'll be celebrating by linking up everywhere I can think of! Check out my links page.