The perfect easy log cabin baby quilt for a quick baby gift!
The Sewing Studio reached out to me to see if I wanted to collaborate on a project and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to write up my Jelly Roll Log Cabin Baby Quilt tutorial! They kindly provided me with a Backyard jelly roll, the backing and binding fabric for this tutorial. (Here’s a link straight to their jelly roll page if you’re keen to get started on a Jelly Roll Log Cabin Baby Quilt! You can filter by brand or colour as well if there’s something specific you’re looking for!)
The Sewing Studio is a fabric and sewing maching shop in Redruth, Cornwall. They are the largest Moda Fabrics stockist in the UK and have a great selection of modern fabrics. They also have an extensive back catalogue of tutorials and how-to’s on their YouTube channel. Covering everything from how to use a sewing machine, start to finish quilts and smaller craft projects like a cushion or table runner! So if you’re looking for more tutorials check out their YouTube channel here!
I’ve made this pattern a few times and it’s a quick quilt top, and a nice one for quilting on your domestic machine because it’s small and manageable! Here’s a couple I’ve made before:
Now let’s get into the tutorial! (I quilt my quilts on my domestic machine, so this tutorial is set out with that in mind. If you send your quilts to a longarm quilter you will need more backing fabric than is stated in the materials list.)
Jelly Roll Log Cabin Baby Quilt
Besides your machine and general sewing supplies like cutting mat and ruller, the materials you’ll need to make one of these log cabin baby quilts are:
- 1 Junior Jelly Roll, or a full Jelly Roll (you’ll be using 20 strips out of the jelly roll which is half a typical jelly roll)
- 1.25 yards or metres of backing fabric (It needs to be at least 44″ long to give you enough over hang on all sides of the quilt top.)
- .5 yard or metre of binding fabric. (For a scrappy binding, you could also use extra strips from your jelly roll if you use a full one, you would need 5 strips. Or check out the binding section below for my suggestion if you want to try something a bit different!)
- piecing and quilting thread in a colour of your choice
- batting of your choice that’s at least 42″x42″
**NOTE – if you are sending this to a longarmer, you will need more backing fabric. Your longarmer should be able to assist you with how much you’ll need for a 40″x40″ quilt with the amount of overage they need to work around!
For the quilt I’ll be making in this tutorial I chose a Backyard jelly roll by Sarah Watts for Ruby Star Society, and paired it with Backyard Chicken in Succulent for the backing, and Backyard Tree Bark in Succulent for the binding. I’m making this for friends of ours that are due in May, but I don’t know the gender, and thought the succulent would be a lovely accent colour whether it’s a boy or girl!
Choosing your strips
For this quilt you’ll need 20 strips and we’ll be splitting these into what I’m going to call “light” and “dark”. This doesn’t have to actually be light and dark, it could be split by colour, or colour family, or prints and solids, etc. I decided to pick out the blues and teals as my “dark” fabrics and the pinks as my “light” fabrics. Throughout the rest of this tutorial I’ll refer to these as “light” and “dark”.
We will need 9 strips for the “light” pile and 11 strips for the “dark” pile. If you are using a junior jelly roll that only has 20 strips you may need to be a little creative with what you decide is in which pile, sometimes it doesn’t split evenly into the two categories. The beauty of this quilt is it ends up looking quite scrappy and the effect should still be visible even if there’s a little cross over between the two piles.
Below are the strips I chose out of my Backyard Jelly Roll, but I’ve also shown an alternate pull you could have from the same jelly roll.
Cutting table for your strips
Here is the cutting table for your strips. We’ll be cutting our strips while they’re folded over so each strip will yield 4 pieces for your quilt blocks. (The 20.5″ cuts are an exception to this, you’ll only get 2 per strip which is why we need an extra strip for the “dark” set!)
Cutting strips while folded
To be more efficient while cutting we’re going to cut our strips while they’re folded over. If you’re not comfortable doing this then feel free to open out each strip and cut them that way! Just rembember that each strip will yield 4 pieces, so make sure your cuts butt up against one another.
You may need to realign your strips if the fabric was folded a little oddly before it was cut into a jelly roll. This is to keep too much of the selvedge from getting into our pieces and to make sure the ends are even. Below is a photo showing how I lined up these strips. You can see how I lined up the edge of the selvedge on the non printed side with the selvedge on the printed side. Then just make sure your strips have the long edges lined up again before cutting.
Cutting your strips
Now to get properly started! Keep your “light” and “dark” strips separate and this will help you stay organised. I cut all of one set before doing the other so I don’t get them mixed up. I also recommend checking lots of times before cutting because if you are using a junior jelly roll there’s no room for error! If you’re using a full jelly roll you may be able to substitute in a strip or two if you make some miscuts, but it can throw off the balance of the fabrics in your quilt. (Shh, here’s a secret, I actually miscut one of the strips for this one because I got cocky and had to sub in an extra strip! That’s why some of the colours meet in the Backyard quilt and they’re more spread out in my two examples at the beginning of this tutorial.. We all make mistakes! But as my mom says, artists don’t make misktakes, they make changes!)
I like to cut from the folded side and to start I will cut off the tiniest sliver of the fold to set up the strip for cutting the pieces.
In the below photos I’ve lined up my strip, and sliced off a teeny tiny piece off the folded edge to get a clean cut.
I then use that fresh cut edge to line up my ruler for the larger cut. For this strip it’s the 18.5″ cut, see below:
Now you should have 2 larger pieces, and the shorter end piece will then be used for the next cut:
Continue to do this for each of your strips for both the “light” and the “dark” strip sets. You’ll end up with a very satisfying pile of strips that should be increasing by 2″ increments:
Layout of the blocks
Once you have all your pieces cut we get to the fun step of sewing and preparing for sewing. With this quilt I like to keep all the pieces in a pile and sew them straigth from that. You can also lay out each of the 4 blocks and piece them that way if you want to set out how they’ll look before you start.
In the photo below I’ve placed the strips in the block configuration just to see how it would look.
In the diagram below you can see the light and dark placement:
Sewing your blocks
When I’m sewing this quilt I like to sew all four blocks at the same time with a method called chain piecing. I keep all my cut pieces in a single pile. After I lay out the block like the above photo I pick up the fabric piles starting with the largest strip (20.5″) and then spiraling down to the middle. If you want to set up your piecing pile in this way your pile should look like this from the bottom up: 4x 20.5″ dark, 4x 18.5″ dark, 4x 18.5″ light, 4x 16.5″ dark, 4x 16.5″ light, 4x 14.5″ dark, 4x 14.5″ light, 4x 12.5″ dark, 4x 12.5″ light, 4x 10.5″ dark, 4x 10.5″ light, 4x 8.5″ dark, 4x 8.5″ light, 4x 6.5″ dark, 4x 6.5″ light, 4x 4.5″ dark, 4x 4.5″ light, 4x 2.5″ dark, 4x 2.5″ light.
If sewing your blocks using my chain piecing method just make sure you’re mixing up the prints as you go so that the prints are getting dispersed throughout the block! Some repetition might be unavoidable, but the beauty of this quilt is how scrappy and fun it ends up. The other thing is not not worry about the directionality of the strips very much because you will probably be turning them later. If directionality of your prints is important to you you’ll want to layout all 4 of your blocks in your chosen layout before you start sewing.
We start with a 2.5″ square of each light and dark and sew them together on one side. You’ll need to iron the seams each time you add a strip so that it all stays flat and even. I iron my seams to the side for this quilt because that creates a stronger seam after quilting. While making these blocks you can iron your seams towards the newest piece added and it should be all nice and flat as you go. With a consistent seam allowance the pieces should all align when adding a new one. Follow the diagrams below to add new pieces and complete the 4 blocks.
Layout possibilities!
After you’ve made the four log cabin blocks comes another fun part! Choosing a layout! Find a space where you can lay out the blocks and see which layout you like best. As you can see by the three of these quilts I’ve made so far I’m a fan of the diamond shape, but it looks quite different if the light is in the middle of the diamond or the dark is in the middle. Check out some of the options I had with my Backyard quilt below:
Once you’ve decided on your layout you need to sew the four blocks together. To do this you can sew the top two blocks, then the bottom two blocks. Iron your seams then sew the top two to the bottom two! Give your finished top a good press with an iron before the basting stage.
Finished top!
Now you have a finished top! The next step will be to quilt this which is adding a backing and a layer of batting and sewing through all three layers to attach them together! If you send your quilts out to a long arm quilter this is when you’ll need to get in touch with them and make sure your backing is big enough for their requirements which will probably be more than the 1.25 yds I mention in the materials list.
Quilting
There are loads of tutorials out there for basting and quilting so I recommend checking those out if you’re not confident with those processes yet. Here’s a video by The Sewing Studio that shows how to use a quilting spray adhesive to baste your quilt. Basting the quilt in halves like they show in this video is how I bast my baby quilts on my dining room table! (They just use a fleece backing, but the process is the same when using a backing fabric and a layer of batting in the middle.)
I used a wavy stitch on my machine to quilt this one and quilted over the seams every 2″ across the quilt in both directions so that it was a big wavy grid. Stitching over the seams is a good way to make sure your seams are secured which is expecially important for baby quilts that will probably get washed a lot!
Emily Dennis from Quilty Love has a great blog and tutorial on how to do a zig zag stitch on your home machine with a walking foot which is similar to the stitch I used only more pointy!
Binding
Here’s a step by step video by The Sewing Studio on how to make and add binding to your quilt. If you’re new to binding it’s a great instructional video that tells you the hows and whys for the whole process!
If you want to try something new with your binding, why not try Susie’s Magic Binding? To do that you’d ignore the binding requirements above and follow the instructions to make the faux flange binding. It looks complicated, but it’s just as easy as a normal binding with an extra step when making your binding.
You’re finished!
Now you get to enjoy your quilt, or enjoy gifting it to a friend or loved one! Making and giving baby quilts is one of my favourite parts of this hobby because they’re a joy to make and small enough to still be fun to quilt on my smaller domestic sewing machine. Then you get to give a handmade gift to someone who will hopefully treasure it forever!
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And don’t forget to check out The Sewing Studio for your fabric, notion, sewing machine needs!
