Slow cut strips

I made my brother a quilt a long, long time ago, almost 20 years ago now (wow!). I hand-quilted it (when I was hand-quilting most of my quilts), so it took a while to make, start-to-finish.

I drafted out the ship blocks after watching an episode of Quilting from the Heartland with Sharlene Jorgenson. But I didn’t want the quilt to be just those ships, so I drafted the waves pattern to be the same finished size block. I used an off-white background fabric for the “sky” area and two different fabrics for the water.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago when I was helping my brother reorganize some stuff at his house, and I got to thinking that he needed a quilt for his guest bedroom. Well, I’ll still need to make that one… because we were talking one night and he said he was going to put his quilt on his king size bed. I’m pretty certain that it won’t even reach the sides, since in the photo above it’s sitting on my queen size waterbed.

So I sat down and drafted out the design that I’ve seen recently online (and then Edyta Sitar showed it as her retreat project, and that cinched it). I’m making him a broken star log cabin quilt. Of course, it requires a lot of cutting. It took me a couple of weeks to cut everything out in the feature photo of this post. But now I’m finally to the point that I can begin piecing.

I haven’t decided how exactly I’m going to border it. I just threw plain borders on there to have something to frame the mockup. And I may do some plain borders (not pieced) – we’ll see when I get closer to having it all put together.

Of course, then I have to make pillow shams — by request. That’s a whole other project to figure out, since they’re for king-size pillows. I’ll want them to coordinate, but they obviously won’t match exactly because the shape for them won’t be square. But I have plenty of time to figure that out too.