We’ve finished two quilts using the last instructions! Thank you so much to everyone who participated! The quilts will be very well loved. Everyone is welcome to contribute blocks to baby quilts, member or not. If you’d like to be on the email list for baby quilts, please email amy@vancouvermodernquiltguild.ca to be added.

After chatting with a number of people, I’ve decided to stick with the rainbow/low volume combo for baby quilts. Low volume fabrics coordinate well together for group projects, and don’t show dirt like white fabric will, and rainbows are a fun gender neutral choice that allow us to use the quilts for whomever’s baby arrives next.

Kathy suggested this quilt by Quirky Granola Girl as an inspiration for this next round.  Our quilts need to be block based at this point in time (we don’t have the time/coordination to do all the background piecing like Melinda did for hers!), so I’ve drafted up a simple log cabin block for us to work with. When the blocks are assembled, we will rotate them around, and maybe add a few more strips if we need to space things out more, and we will hopefully do our inspiration justice!

(our inspiration, courtesy of Quirky Granola Girl)

Once again, we’ll be using LOW VOLUME fabrics and BRIGHT RAINBOW fabrics that are mostly tone-on-tones. 

Not sure what constitutes a low-volume fabric? Check out this link or this link for some examples and explanation.

We want the bright colours to really read as the rainbow colour, that’s why we’re asking for tone-on-tones. If you have a print with a minimal amount of another colour (like blue with a bit of white), that’s fine, as long as it reads as a bright blue. (Squint your eyes and look at the fabric – what colour do you see?) Fabrics that read as pastels won’t be appropriate because they won’t be a high enough contrast with the low volume fabrics. If you don’t have enough tone-on-tone prints, you can substitute with a few solids.

Step 1: To start with, make a log cabin block using various fabrics in ONE rainbow colour. It can be as simple as one round on each side of a centre piece, or as complex as multiple rounds.

The centre piece doesn’t have to be centred in the block and it can be either a square or a rectangle. Just pick a colour, and use scraps to make a log cabin. Your coloured log cabin should be between 4.5″ – 6″ inches on each side. (for the second round, go with 3.5″-5″ please)

Step 2:  Start adding strips of low volume fabric around the coloured log cabin. Alternate the width of the strips so that the coloured log cabin isn’t perfectly centred in the block.

You could also only add strips on three sides, so that your coloured log cabin is really off centre in the block. We want a variety of blocks, so play with it.

Step 3: Keep adding strips! Again, you don’t need to keep the coloured log cabin centred, so feel free to only add strips on two or three sides, or alternate width of your low volume strips.

Step 4: When your block measures AT LEAST 12.5″x 12.5″, you’re done! PLEASE DO NOT TRIM YOUR BLOCK.

Step 5: Bring your finished blocks back to the JANUARY guild meeting. once again, PLEASE DO NOT TRIM YOUR BLOCKS! We may end up cutting some of the blocks and sewing them back together to aid in giving it a more “improv” look and having a bit of extra leeway will make it much easier to put them back together.

A few other notes to keep in mind –

We hope that these quilts will be loved and used for a long time! Please use quilt shop quality fabrics and make sure that your seam allowances are AT LEAST 1/4″. With an improv block like this, you can even make them a smidge wider if you’d like!

If you get into a groove and make all your rainbow log cabins first, it’s easy to add the low volume strips to multiple blocks at once. I suggest making blocks with a variety of colours, so that we don’t end up with 12 blue and no orange!

We’d like to get enough blocks to make 2 quilts using this tutorial, more if we can! That means we’ll need 16 blocks per quilt, and at least 32 blocks total.

Once all the blocks are finished, we’ll need people to sew them together and to quilt the tops. Please email amy@vancouvermodernquiltguild.ca if you’d like to volunteer for one of those jobs.