Quarter Square Log Cabin Quilt

When Radiant Orchid was named Pantone's 2014 Color of the Year, it unleashed the inner purple lover in me. I've always loved cool colors like green, blue and purple, but for the last fifteen years I've swayed more toward green or teal. I've fully embraced my love of all things purple again this year and this quilt is no different. My 7th grade self would totally go crazy for this quilt!

This quilt came together super fast. To recap my WIP Wednesday post, I used Rossie's tutorial (seen here) for quartered log cabins. The centers of each square started at 8"x8", the top and bottom strips were 3"x8" and the left and right strips were 3"x13". For this quilt, I made 48 large cabins and then cut them each into 4 different 6"x6" quarters (196 final blocks). I used up most of 24 different fat quarters for this quilt coming in at a final size of 66"x88".

I quilted this with free motion squares after being inspired by Angela Walter's craftsy class, Machine Quilting: Small Changes, Big Variety. In her class, she emphasized that it's best not to fret over how each tiny stitch looks and to use blending thread so that every seemingly huge mistake is less noticeable. While the quilting has lots and lots of mistakes in it, the overall organic look of the overlapping squares really shows through the errors I made and I love how it turned out. It's great to have another quilting technique in my arsenal, too!



The drape of this quilt is one of my favorite parts. I've been using Pellon Nature's Touch batting for all of my quilts and I really like the thickness of the cotton. The hand of the Andover Alison Glass Sun print backing fabric and the peppered cottons are fantastic too.  I think those two factors, combined with the denser quilting, really created a soft and vintage feeling quilt.



I'm debating what to do with this quilt. I love it, but we're reaching quilt capacity in our house, so I think it's going in the gift pile for now. I may need to live with it for a few more months before I can part with it, though.