Looking back ten years

 Ten years ago I made 9 log cabin Chrismas quilts for my family for Christmas. The blocks were 7 inches finished and the quilts were around 46 x 60. I designed them in Electric Quilt and they are all different. By designing the layouts in EQ I was able to figure out how many of each  kind of block that I needed. I made 9 identical blocks, one for each quilt. In each quilt it was in a different place. I told everyone that it was there but they had to figure out which one it was. 

I started in November a year earlier and I finished all the blocks by September the following year  and I finished the quilts before Thanksgiving. 

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I would not allow myself to start any new projects during the time I worked on them but I could work  on unfinished projects. Log cabin blocks are labor intensive and making them can get boring after awhile so I broke up the time with other things. That year I finished every UFO that I had. there were none left by the time the LC quilts were finished. Everyone was surprised because no one ever saw  me working on them.

I thought that if I made everyone Christmas quilts they might last forever because they wouldn't be used all the time. My mother in law kept hers out all the time because she liked it. She didn't really use it but kept it draped  over the  back  of a love seat. When  she moved into a nursing home she used it every day and it was laundered in the laundry there. We have it now that she is gone and it still  looks pretty good, only a few of the green fabrics are faded. 

 

Below on the left is the one block  that was identical in every quilt.  

Now that there are great grand children I think about making Christmas quilts for them, that would be 5 quilts. I still have some red, white and  green strips and I am considering pineapple log cabin.

From the time I started quilting I always liked to include something in every family quilt I made that I had used in another family quilt.  I think I started doing it because I bought 10 yards of a  background print but it seemed like a nice tradition  to continue. The quilts are kind of like families

the come from the same gene/fabric pool but they are each different and unique.