This is what 144 scrappy cabins looks like:
Glamorous, I know. Dig the zip-locking component on those plastic baggies. Aww, yeah!
During my last couple of weeks on my long journey to 256 log cabin squares (and what, I ask you, was I thinking?), I decided it was time to become an excessive counter. Once the blocks had grown into a number I could legitimately refer to as “a lot” I kept going on vacation (I know, poor Jennicakes) and forgetting how many I had made.
So I devised a simple system of counting out a stack of ten and ensconcing it safely in one of the many ziplocks I keep around for mailing orders and trades to damp climates. I know those posh fold-over bags with the glue strip are more to the fashion, but I always hope the unsightly but utilitarian zip lock will at least inspire re-use.
Anytothewho, a bunch of bags of groups of tens (who invited Dr. Suess?) would mean that, to see how many blocks I’d made, I could simply count the bags and multiply by ten, thereby saving myself many hours. Little did I know that once I had bagged all of the blocks, I’d notice that I’d made 143 blocks. Which is one shy of 144, or, as we quilters say, 12 by 12.
Hmm, I thought. Do I really need a 16 by 16 block quilt? Sure it would look really freaking impressive, but had I even conceptualized how large a quilt with 16 5″ blocks, plus sashing, would be? I did some quick math in my head and concluded that it would make one BIG ASS quilt. Like, bigger than necessary. Unwieldy for finishing, which I could deal with, and possibly for sleeping under which… no. Just no.
I re-counted the blocks in their bags to make sure no stack was short - I mean, imagine the horror of beginning to sash all of these, only to find I was a few short? Turns out, one stack was… long? As in, not short. As in, there were eleven in the bag. As in, if I decided to make a 12 by 12 grid, I was finished making log cabins.
I’d love to report on the happy dance that ensued, but, frankly, it didn’t. The whole thing was an anticlimax and I really stressed over whether or not I should make more. See, starting my job really cut into my log cabin time, so I wasn’t able to get it finished - let alone sashed - in time for my goal, which was to enter it into the county fair. So after a few weeks of abject self-loathing, followed by a deep resolve to finish it by my 30th birthday/the end of the year, to find that those final 112 blocks would just be superfluous actually made me feel kind of sad.
I strongly considered going ahead with them, but, as I mentioned before, that’s a hell of a lot of work to put into a quilt that’s so long you have to tunnel under it for five minutes just to sneak out of bed for a 2 a.m. pee.
So, that’s that. No carefully choreographed, sun-drenched photo-shoot to show them off; just a bunch of squares in a Danskos box. Honestly, I’m just so bewildered that I made it this far. Even though I want this finished quilt more than I have ever wanted any material possession, ever, I still can’t quite believe I made enough of these, without even realizing it.
