Finished Log Cabin

I made this log cabin for my daughter, Paolina. Right now she is away with her grandma in Alaska, but the rest of us took the quilt with us to enjoy sundown over the Pacific and to see if we could get some pictures of the quilt. I have been working on this for years now. It took just a few evenings to piece it about six years ago and I’ve been slowly quilting it ever since. I can’t say that I’ve been diligently working away, but I do think that it has taken a couple hundred hours to quilt. Over the last several years I have had several bursts of activity on it, especially when my sons were born and I had a bit of recovery time on the couch or in bed. After my youngest son was born I was able to finish everything but the border, and then, over the past few months I got quite sick and had the time to finish the border and bind the quilt while I recovered.

I began to make the quilt on a whim so I just picked bright colors from what I had on hand. I didn’t have enough of some of them, so I just substituted something similar. I think if I were to do it again, I would adjust the layout and not make it so symmetrical.

Once I started quilting it I was afraid that it wouldn’t be a quilt that would grow with Paolina colorwise. I also wasn’t sure that I liked it, but when I had it flat to trim it for binding, I saw the whole thing in the light and realized that I really do like it. It’s youthful and vibrant and has tons of energy, but also sweet -- just like Paolina. I also like how pure and rich the color is, very saturated, not clouded with grey or white. I quilted around the pieces of each section of the log cabin blocks using a light green quilting thread. I used a between and a small stitch, the smallest I could manage. It is an old fashioned look and it takes MUCH longer to execute, but I'm really a fan of this style. For the border on the top of the quilt I quilted a twisted rope pattern and at the center of the bottom border I quilted her initials. For the sides and the rest of the bottom I quilted little birds.

For the birds we were inspired by an Emily Dickenson poem called, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers”. I had initially thought that it would be a good poem for Lucia’s quilt, but she prefered another poem about roses and since she picked some fabric with roses on it we went in that direction for her. Paolina was attached to the Emily Dickenson poem, and I love it too. On the back I intend to make a label that includes the poem. That’s the only thing that hasn’t been done yet.