Raise the Roof Quilt finished!

I put the finishing touches on the Raise the Roof quilt aka Log Cabin Challenge this weekend!

The Log Cabin Challenge began when Julie, Carin, Cynthia and I got together at the Tokyo International Quilt Festival in January.  Each year for the past four or five year we have given ourselves a challenge (often inspired by what we see at the quilt show) and we have worked on Circles and Mola and Cathedral Windows etc.  This January we decided on the Log Cabin pattern as it seemed to give a lot of room for interpretation.  I had thought I would try to construct different shapes and motifs from the simple log cabin technique but that never got pulled together.  Instead, I came across the Raise the Roof pattern in one of my books and since I am so much better at following a pattern than I am at thinking up something original I just dove in to the rather large quilt....  

Another good way to use up scraps and stash was also at the back of my mind.

I started the Raise the Roof in March and worked on it through to the beginning of July when I had a flimsy made.  I fretted a lot about the quilting and put a lot more thought into the quilting process than I usually do.  This quilt had whitish areas (log cabin white side), darkish areas (log cabin dark side), stars and border.  That meant I wanted four different quilting motifs with variations where the parts met.

I think I started out with Sulky variegated brown thread for most of the freemotion quilting.  I made a few marks for starting and stopping points but for most of the quilting center I didn't mark further.  Somewhere partway through I ran out of the brown thread and switched to Sulky variegated blue thread but no one is going to notice the slight difference... 

I did have one major mishap when I found I was quilting feathers all in the wrong direction (three sides going one way, one side looping the other way) and and spent two days removing all those stitches. 

I also realized part way through that my spray basting wasn't holding and a large quarter of the backing had gotten wrinkled and a large part had been quilted in pleats...  Sigh...  I spent another day ripping out that section and only made a partial recovery from that mishap...  Sadly, there is still a portion of the backing that remains wrinkled...  I guess this quilt will have to go to someone who loves me and will forgive the mistakes... 

For the border I put my thinking cap on as I didn't just want to stitch in the ditch through all those piano keys.  I did get out the marking tool again and measure and mark off triangles in the border and then double the line, do the remaining stitch in the ditch and add some petals within the triangle. 

The label I've had in my drawer for years and years and don't remember where it came from...  I just added my name and date and the name of the quilt on the side as there wasn't any room anywhere else...  The backing is made of multicolored scraps of the same fabric series which I think I used for Leiya's wedding quilt last year.

I hung the quilt in the living room just so I could take a full photo of it... Tetsu didn't even notice that I'd taken down the small boat quilt that had been up there and replaced it with this very large, very colorful quilt that rather overpowers the small space!  

As for the revealing of our Log Cabin challenges, I know that Carin is almost finished with the construction of her project and Cynthia has made two or three log cabin quilts, the most recent a baby quilt for her new granddaughter.   Julie I'm not sure where she is in her work though she has been working hard on a Coronaville quilt plus numerous other large quilts.  The Tokyo Quilt Festival has been canceled however so there isn't going to be a great reveal for our Log Cabin Challenge next year... at least not in person.  (I was wondering how I was going to lug this large quilt to Tokyo and back and carry it around the quilt show but that problem is now of naught.)  We will have to figure out some other way to show or projects to each other and to our blog friends.  

It feels good to have this quilt under my belt and the scrap bin a bit less full!