Little house on the prairie

I don't live on a prairie.  I don't even live near a prairie.  I'm not even too sure exactly what 'prairie' style is to be honest.  But when I saw this delightful Prairie Girl quilt here and here on Alicia Paulson's fabulous site 'Posy gets Cozy' I knew I needed some prairie in my life!

For me, 'Prairie Style' conjures up images of old fashioned farmhouses, wheat fields and those delightful feed-sack prints that are about the place.  I suppose 'Little House on the Prairie', not that I ever really remember seeing a whole episode, just about sums it up.  Maybe 'The Waltons', I happened across that one a little more.  Probably an entirely inaccurate mishmash of an image and I apologise to my American readers here and now.  But that's where my mind takes me I'm afraid.

I 'pulled' all my feed-sack, teeny tiny flower prints and other assorted 30's and reproduction print fabrics and I set about making plans for a log-cabin quilt.  For some reason I had terrible trouble with all my calculations for this quilt. 

I kept having to go back and cut more pieces of this bit of fabric or the other.  A few bits I cut wrong.  Handy for the scraps tin, I suppose.  Also handy when I made my Mummy Love needle book too, as these were the scraps I used to make it.

I even managed to make about twice the amount of binding I needed too.  My brain must be reaching it's 'best before' date I think.

Anyway, once I had finally cut out all my little squares and rectangles, I set about piecing my blocks.  It's very enjoyable to piece log-cabin blocks, much easier than the ones for my first quilt.   And it didn't take me very long to get a nice pile of blocks sitting on the desk beside me.

There had to be a 'heap' picture now didn't there?

I tried not to copy Alicia's quilt too much.  You know, apart from the entire quilt idea, the prairie style, the type of blocks....  apart from that, I tried not to copy it too much.  I didn't look at her quilt again after I initially poured over it with love and adoration when I first saw it.  But I did remember that she used cream sashing between the blocks, which set them off so beautifully.  So, yes, after some lay out pondering, I did that too.

I think what I love best about this quilt is that each block is different.  A different colour emphasis, different fabrics giving each block a different feel.  Lots to look at.  I like that.

Next came the dreading 'basting and quilting' part.  After my first quilt, I should have felt reasonably confident with this.  The first time it went pretty well all things considered.  Not perfect, but well enough and I learnt a lot about how I would approach the job next time round.  But when it came to it, I found all that stuck in my mind was the difficult task of lugging the quilt through my little home machine and I wasn't looking forward to doing it again.

Alicia's quilt was hand tied and it was very tempting to copy that too, just to avoid the job but I do so love the little valleys of the quilt lines.  Last time I quilted 'in the ditch' and followed the edges of my blocks.  This time I wanted to see the quilting a little more so I decided to go diagonally through the squares. 

It was a good decision.  I didn't bother to mark any lines as the blocks gave me a nice corner to aim for every inch or so and it also meant that if I started on the middle line, the longest, each quilting line I had to make after that got shorter and shorter.  Extremely satisfying.  Using this method I fairly whizzed through the job and had the whole thing done with just a morning's work.

For the binding, I used this tutorial from Amy Smart of 'Diary of a Quilter', which was an absolute winner.  The instructions were very clear and although I had my heart in my mouth for the 'sewing the binding together before you sew it to the quilt' part, I put my faith in Amy and was duly rewarded with a perfectly fitted, mitred corner binding.  Thank you Amy!

It's been hanging around, almost done for the entire Easter holidays and it was only tonight that the very last finishing touch has been added.  It just needed it's quilty little label to be completely complete.

There.  All done!

It's very pretty. I'm very pleased with it and looking back at Alicia's quilt now, I'm also pleased to see that it does have a separate and distinct style of it's own (thank goodness).  I love the brightness and contrasting fabrics in Alicia's quilt.  She's used some more modern and funky prints in hers which I love too, but mine fits very well with that funny, mixed up, Little House look that I had in my mind, which makes me very happy indeed.

It's supposed to be in the living room, that's what I had in mind when I made it, but it looked so right on my bed when I laid it out for this picture, I haven't had the heart to take it off yet.  It's been so nice to snuggle under on these colder nights we've been having lately too.  (It's almost like I need to make another one now!)

S x


PS - I've changed the comments to 'pop-up form' style instead of my usual 'embedded' ones because some people have problems commenting.  So we'll try this way for a while as an experiment.  Let me know if you can post now if you couldn't before or vice versa.  (If you can't comment now, you can email me, the linky is on my sidebar near the top in the 'Follow Me' section.

PPS - The cushion back tutorial is ready (eeek) and coming next week!