A New Project From The Magic Basket

We've had a rough winter so far in my neck of the woods:  snow, ice, sleet, more snow, more ice, slush - in a word, YUCK!  Not the kind of weather for driving 40 minutes to the LQS for supplies. 

So I decided to skip over my Hawaii quilt project for now (for which I need additional yardage) and instead, turn to a project I could start with what I have on hand.  After checking my Pinterest to-do list, I settled on a log cabin design using fabric from the magic basket, aka basket of a thousand quilts. 

The magic basket is where I've been keeping my stash of Fig Tree Quilts fabrics.  This is the collection of fat quarters and other pre-cuts I bought over time and put away because they were too pretty to use.  Then a couple of years ago, I resolved to use them, calling it my Fig Tree Harvest.  I've made six quilts so far but the level in the basket hardly appears to lower.  Does it have magic properties?  Now I call it the basket of a thousand quilts. 

Anyway...On Saturday, I started pulling fabric from the stash, pressing, and cutting.  I'm using the Marti Michell method, where you cut each log to size.  This is in contrast to the Quilt in a Day method, the technique I used for my first log cabin quilt, where you sew long strips of fabric, trimming after sewing to get the correct size. This method worked fine for me the first time I used it, for a very simple log cabin with large blocks (it was the first quilt I made on a sewing machine; my prior projects were from the dark ages of hand piecing), but the second time, with narrower logs, the blocks did not end up all exactly the same size.  So I'm trying the cut-to-size method this time.  It is a LOT of cutting!  By dinner time on Saturday, I had the light strips cut and have been working on the dark side strips today.

This print from the Fresh Cottons collection is my inspiration for color for the quilt. 

 

Back to pressing and cutting.  I'm almost done and want to get to the sewing part!  Can you believe I've used almost a whole bottle of spray starch on this?

 

I'm joining Kim's Scrap Basket Sunday with this project.  Go take a look at the other scrap projects.