The Sea Stack Quilt

Two cairns of nautical colors are the focus of this baby quilt… but can I be honest for a hot second about those cairns? They were supposed to be clean-cut geese flocking in two directions. More seagull than cairn. I was trying a new method of speed-piecing geese, and wound up with tips grounding themselves into the next triangle, totem-like.

It’s completely possible that the mistake lies with me, and not the speed-piecing tutorial (which I now can’t find for the life of me). This is a summer quilt creation, which means I was in my little Brooklyn kitchen at a small IKEA table, the box fan in the window at the highest setting, glass of water sweating and running into the fabric, and me looking at numbers, trying to cut and piece correctly. This could be an episode of Jess-math. Or maybe the speed-piecing tutorial is not foolproof. Either way, I found I liked the triangles linking the way they did, and so didn’t break out the stitch-ripper.

I kept the hand-quilting simple, just ran a few lines of it up and down the quilt to continue the motion of the cairns. The backing is a soft blue flannel and a few scrappy pieces, including a navy & gold-striped strip from Cotton + Steel.

P.S. This quilt is now available at Brooklyn Collective (Red Hook/Brooklyn) and through my Etsy shop!