CASA Quilt for 2015

Monroe County CASA 2015 Quilt

Kentucky Log Cabin Quilt

Last year I made a quilt for a raffle fund raiser for Monroe County CASA.  The quilt was magnificent and raised almost $5,000 for the charity.  When they asked me again if I could come up with a quilt for the raffle, I thought to myself the Neighborhood Quilt was going to be really difficult to follow.  But there are so many beautiful quilt patterns by some very talented designers.  Another of my most favorite designers is Judy Martin.  Judy is a master at making log cabin blocks into amazing and fabulous patterns.  The Kentucky Log Cabin Quilt from her Log Cabin Quilt Book published in 2007 caught my interest.  It has cute little cabins and lots of log cabin blocks (my favorites).  This had lots of potential for the "Safe Homes, Safe Kids" theme of the raffle. 

Now I have a very extensive store of fabric to make a scrappy quilt.  And I love, love, love scrappy quilts that use many different fabrics focusing mostly on values, light and dark.  When I make a quilt from this wide variety of fabrics, it makes me think about my world.  A scrappy quilt is like people.  So many differences but we can still all come together to make something beautiful.  

Fabric stash choices.

Piles of 1.25-inch strips.

This is just a small sample of the options I had to make this quilt.  It needed lots of color.  The next step was to cut the fabric into 1.25-inch strips.  Again, my AccuQuilt die cutter was indispensable.  I cut and cut and cut.  Then the strips have to be cut into the right lengths for each round of the log cabin blocks.  These blocks are 9-inches finished so there are 21 pieces in each of the 72 log cabin blocks.  I like to cut all the pieces for my quilts before I start sewing.  There are over 2,600 pieces in this 96-inch square quilt.  That is a lot of pieces!!

There are nine house blocks in this quilt.

The log cabin blocks come next then 4 borders to form the frame.  Each border strip finishes at just 3/4 of an inch so precision was a necessity for this to all fit together correctly.  The final outside border is made up of 732 2-inch squares.  Again, precision was to key for this to all work together.  Judy Martin patterns are so amazing!

Close up of cabin block
with borders.

Here is a close up of the cabin with all the borders.  This is going to be really spectacular when it is quilted!  

Now my task is to design something interesting for the backing.  I have some ideas.  

As I am looking at the picture at the top of this post, I notice that one of the log cabin blocks is turned 90 degrees too far clockwise.  Do you see it?  Should I leave it that way or fix it??  Probably have to fix it.  Oh well.  No one is perfect, eh?

More to come.....  Happy quilting!