Gabe's Log Cabins

Do you make quilts as baby gifts? I do! I seem to be making a whole lot more of them these days and anticipate making even more of them now that I have made friends with girls who have babies Daniel's age and who plan to have more babies in the next few years. 

This quilt you see here is for my littlest nephew, Gabe. Gabe was born in March 2012, just 3(ish) months after Daniel. Gabe has an older brother, Logan, who is now about 2 and a 1/2. I made a quilt for Logan that you can read about here if you like. 

I started this quilt for Gabe a long time ago. I had thought I would do a tutorial on it, but never finished it. I cut the strips the same size as what the original quilt was. When I started to sew this together though, I just put what I thought looked best next to each other. Some blocks are bigger than others because of this. I like the way the two quilts started out the same, but look so completely different in the end. Logan's quilt was a straight up, traditional log cabin with rigid sashing. It was fun and fresh because of the colors and fabrics I used, but it was really quite modern. Because I took a break on this one for Gabe, I reconsidered a lot of the things I had done the first time and really like the final product. 

I do get bored doing the same thing over and over, but this was a fun way to re-invent what I had already done.

Have I mentioned that I really like to quilt? I love super dense quilting on things.  I love the texture it provides. I decided when it came time to quilt this one that I was not going to rip out any of the quilting, but I was also going to try as many different patterns as I could. When I was ready to start the quilting on this, I went to my friend Angela's book "Free Motion Quilting with Angela Walters" to become inspired. If you don't already own Angela's book, you should. It's fantastic.

And in case you are curious, I quilt on my domestic machine. It's not huge and isn't anything super outrageously fancy, but it does the job. I do have a grace quilting frame in my basement waiting to be used, but all the machines I own are too small for it. I put my biggest throated machine on it and it still only gave me about 2" worth of quilting space to begin with and the presser foot bouncing up and down against the rolled quilt made a hole in my quilt top. So (at least for now) I happily quilt on a plain old domestic machine.

-Jessica