President's Challenge

Last December, I entered my quilt guild's President's Challenge. For 4$, all participants received a mysterious paper bag - inside were instructions and a fat quarter of red dotted fabric.

The instructions were to construct a quilt (100" maximum circumference, so 20"x30" or 25"x25" etc, or smaller) made primarily of log-cabin blocks, whether traditionally pieced or wonky/contemporary, and the red fabric had to be clearly visible on the front.

With that in mind, I racked my brain about what I could do. I didn't want to just make a simple block, because I'm a very lazy log-cabin piecer... I hate the ironing after every seam, so I skip that step and just finger-press. The result is that my blocks come out not quite with 90 degree angles and straight lines. So I decided to come up with something that works with my, let's call them "relaxed", log cabin blocks. Well, I got pretty elaborate as you can see below:


What you see here is the quintessential Canadian landscape: Log cabins around a lake in the woods with a clear sky above (and at night that sky is filled with stars and a moon :).

The log cabins are traditional log cabins and the red fabric in the center is the paper-bag fabric. Since log cabins are often wonky, I figured my crooked seams would be okay here...

In the center of the pond, which is also pieced log-cabin style are two fish swimming around - wouldn't be a proper fishin' pond otherwise!

The trees are truly wonky log cabins and I just added random strips of green fabric around at different angles.

And then I played with some stars - I couldn't figure out any way to make those log cabins so they're not :) The tiniest star is pieced from 1.5" squares for the HSTs, I think that's the tiniest block I've made in my life :) The moon is appliqued (rough edge).

The quilting is quite elaborate too:


There are stars in the sky and different tree species:


Waves on the pond:


There's grass on the lawn, and the log cabins are truly built of wood:


Ready to go to the guild jury at May's monthly meeting :) I'm so curious to see what everyone else did!