I recently finished up a 'wearable art' jacket, using Moonlight Design's "Sunset Strip" pattern (www.moonlightdesignquilts.com). The jacket called for eight different fabrics in the same color family, and blue was my color of choice. The lining was navy, but the strips ranged from light periwinkle to teal to true blue.
Funny thing, though...when I finished the jacket, I had stacks and stacks of leftover strips of fabric that were 1 1/2" wide. Since I hate to throw anything out, I browsed through a few quilting books, and found a block suitable for using up the leftovers, plus a few fabric scraps I pulled from my stash. It is a variation of a log cabin block, called "Barn Raising Log Cabin."
There are two things that make this quilt block different from a regular log cabin block. The first is the center square. On the barn raising block, the center is made up of two triangle pieces, one light and one dark (also called 'half square triangles'). Second, the fabric strips were sorted into three piles: light, medium and dark. The light strips were sewn on the two sides adjacent to the light triangle, and the dark strips were sewn on the two sides adjacent to the dark triangle. The medium strips were mixed in on both sides.
This baby quilt is made up of 16 blocks. When I laid the blocks out, I arranged the dark sides of four blocks together to form the center. As I added the other blocks, I matched the light sides to another light side, and the dark sides to dark sides. By aligning dark to dark and light to light, another design pops out...a square, on point, in the center, within a band of light, then dark, surrounding it.
I framed the quilt with a dark, narrow border, and added a four inch medium-toned border all around. Can you imagine what this would look like if the quilt were 12 blocks wide by 16 blocks long? It would make a beautiful queen-sized quilt.
So, why is this quilt for a baby girl? Well, you can't see it too well from this photo, but the fabrics have floral prints, swirls and patterns that read 'girly,' and there's a lot of periwinkle (bordering on violet) in the border print. Plus, I have a friend who is expecting in mid-winter, and I think she'll really love this for her firstborn.
There is still a pretty large pile of 1 1/2" wide strips left over...some day, I'll make something else from them. In the meantime, I have to get busy on two other baby quilts...we're expecting two grand-nephews or neices on my husband's side of the family soon!
Keep stitchin'!
Renee
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