toothpaste & orange cat: pairs of logs queen size quilt

people ask me quite a bit what i do when i'm not working, going to school, teaching dance classes or running my own photography business. well friends. here is the best example yet.
amy & luke got married. you should be well aware of that now. back in october, amy booked the venue and made it official. that meant i had 5 months to knock out some form of wedding present for them, and it had to be awesome. actually, i had been planning their wedding present since they got engaged in december of 2010, but it was always a mental image. now i had to make it happen. lisa was here for a short while in october as well, so i left after class on a monday afternoon & headed out to modesto for the evening to do some fabric shopping. i had purchased a log cabin quilt book on amazon for a dollar (score! it was like 25 at joann's) and basically picked the pattern for the quilt determined on one of the four that had an actual picture and yardage listed for the quilt. after much shuffling of bolts, we i ended up with this selection.

from there, it was on to painstakinly measuring and cutting out the pattern pieces, since the cuts for each piece were not listed. not fun, let me tell you. if i do this pattern again, i'm going to have the pattern enlarged at kinkos. but after cutting 19 pieces per block, and i think there were 48 blocks total, it was time to get sewing. i did everything one piece at a time, numbers 1-19 mixed in with school work, photography, teaching, and everything inbetween... these were created.

pretty cool, right? yeah, i'm totally making you do a lot of things before i get to the actual quilt outcome.
figuring out the layout for this was dreadful... but then after it was complete, it was stupidly obvious. i wanted to use the same layout that was shown in the book, but my first attempt had these HORRIBLE eyesore circles all over it. like, the center of the quilt, but everywhere. finally, with an extra set of eyes, it was figured out and pieced together... and here it is...

boom. quilt. and you wanna know who quilted that sucker? ME. but let's tell that story in a minute. there's another pressing topic that has to be covered... like more pictures. and the story about the back.

yep. loving it. more pictures... like some sweet borders and stripey binding.

yeah. imagine that circle in the middle ALL OVER the quilt. it was bad. like those magic eye optical illusion books kind of bad.

oh look! we're on to the back now.

so the issue with this was i didn't want to buy a gazillion yards of fabric to do the back of the quilt, so i went "hey... i'll just buy a sheet!" which is something i do often with quilts. this quilt was queen size, so i bought a queen size sheet. makes sense, right? WRONG. after ripping out all the seams to get it to the furthest possible inches it could have... it was still a good couple inches too short. i was ready to hulk smash. but instead of doing that, i pulled some fabric in from the front that i had leftover, and made a back panel to insert in to add some extra length to it. and all was well. until i had a batting freak out the same night. but that was because i had it the wrong way. late nights & quilt drama are not a good combo. carry on.

clearly all my photos were of the front (as they should be... it's much fancier) so now the quilting story. i took over our kitchen for a week (minimum) in order to baste it all by hand, since i didn't have enough safety pins and it was ginormous. there is a picture of the madness somewhere... but i'll have to locate it. i spent hours crawling around listening to the walter mitty soundtrack mixed with cassadee pope's frame by frame while basting. finally, it was done and i was ready to quilt. but then my quilting thread i was going to use was MIA. late night run to joann's, bout a spool of thread, and we were ready for action. i zigged and zagged my way around all of the tan & green parts, which leaves that design showing on the back. once it was complete, i sewed that binding on and spent many hours watching jimmy fallon on the tonight show chugging my way through hand sewing. finished it pretty much the week before the wedding, wrapped it up and called it good to go. amy & luke loved it, and sent me photos of it already on their bed. such great friends. so worth the craziness of this quilt.
would i do it again? maybe...
but i think i'll take a break and make some baby quilts for some special people with new little ones in their life, or on the way in to their life :)