Cabin Peaks Quilt Along

Cabins Peak

This quilt is all about the fabric. I had traveled all the way from California to the muggy land of Melbourne, Florida, and I will admit I was not excited about it. I was visiting my Great Aunt Connie who was celebrating her 94th birthday. While she is one of the most hardcore women I know, ( she was the first woman to wear pants to her work and she answers the phone ‘Hello this is Constance, world’s oldest virgin speaking’) I am genuinely against heavy humidity and bugs.

I found the fabric in a little shop called Quilt Boutique. There were four long pieces, with a gradual gradient from dark to light. There was a dark green that faded into an emerald, to lime green and on to yellow. I also found a purple, blue, and pink one. I had absolutely no idea what I could use it for. But I knew that I wasn’t going to leave the shop, or Florida, without it. I returned to California shortly after, pleasantly surprised by the trip and the fabric findings. 

It was important to me that I honored the fabric for how it was made. I wanted to be able to show off the gradient in some way. I wasn’t aware of any patterns that would allow me to do so, and so I held onto the fabric for months. Until I found the Cabin Peaks Quilt Along group where we would post our progress week by week. The pattern was made by Cotton and Joy and featured these large strips that formed triangles. Immediately the gradient fabric popped in my mind.

At first, I was terrified to cut it. The fear of ruining it stood strong in my mind and so I rallied my husband and daughter for advice. There were two options, cut long strips that travel with the gradient, or slice along the edges to separate the color changes. It was decided upon to cut with the gradient. 

I was given two months to complete the quilt but in truth, I sewed most of it together within three days. The entire time I worked on the blocks I was praying I hadn’t screwed it up. But alas I was left with an array of colored blocks, choosing to dedicate one block to one shade of the gradient. So I had a dark green block, a mid-green block, and a near yellow one. 

Now was the real challenging part. How best put it together? I threw up the Quilt Wall in my living room, a massive fabric rectangle meant for you to layout your blocks in an easy to move around fashion. I told my family I’d sew whatever they put together. Little did I know I had just launched the great family quilt debate of 2019.

Just so you know, my family is never seen altogether. But suddenly, my four adult children, their two friends, and my husband all stood around the wall debating how to lay out the squares. My daughter wanted to make a retro mountainscape, the neighbor kid suggested separating the colors, my husband arranged gradient stripes. 

Weeks passed and every day I would walk out to the Quilt Wall sporting a new layout. No one seemed able to crack the code, find the perfect sequence. Nothing had felt right. 

At first, I thought I would finish the quilt weeks before it was due, now I was running out of time. I rifled through the pictures I had taken of the various layouts and ended up merging a few of the ideas together. Wanting to avoid my seam ripper for the day, I paid close attention to sewing it together. This pattern is a bit too easy to screw up, and I didn’t need that. 

As my family emerged from their hiding holes, I showed them the updated creation. While it no longer showed the gradient as how the fabric originally presented it, I think the way the light section in the middle and the darker blocks on the edges still shows off the beauty of this fabric still. 

Earlier I said this quilt is all about the fabric, really though it was about family. Connecting with family brought me the fabric, the blocks brought together my children, and the quilt was delivered to Arizona to cheer up a sick relative. Cheesy as it may be, quilting does have a way of stitching us all together.