My youngest son requested a new (bigger) bed quilt and I was happy to oblige.  A few years back I made a quarter-log-cabin quilt for him, but it's too short when we tuck it in on his bed (and actually use it as a comforter/bedspread). You can see pictures of that one here.  That meant that my #1 goal for this quilt was "big!"
Back in May, when I began designing the quilt, my family and I were really missing some previously-schedule camping trips. We longed to get outside, and travel and see new things.  So I went with tents for the quilt blocks.

I went with improv-pieced tent blocks with lots of black negative space.  My son has fun Echino canvas curtains in his room (see above), so I made my tents turquoise, and ended up going with dark yellow for the center of the quilt.

I used one fat-quarter of black fabric per block and came up with a simple piecing method: I added two turquoise strips to my yellow triangle and then laid that triangle on the black fat-quarter.  I cut one long line along one side of my tent (above that would be the right side cut), and then pulled that black piece away and cut the second background piece along the left side of my tent.  Then I added the black pieces to the tent in the reverse of how I cut it, ie: in the example above I sewed the left side on first, then sewed on the right side.  Once all my blocks were complete, I trimmed them down to 15.5" square.

At my son's request, I added two little fussy-cut applique bears in one of the tents. I know that I personally have spent many nights in a tent listening to branches and leaves scratching against my tent, and imagining that it might be bears outside.  For that reason I think it's humorous to have the bears in the tent peeking out cautiously.

I added a few improv stars to the top of the quilt because I love them...and I knew that the top of the quilt would most likely be folded over on my son's bed ( so he could pet the minky as he fell asleep) and I didn't need to make any more tents. 

This was the general plan that I laid out in Electric Quilt 8 (EQ8). The tents aren't quite the same scale that I ended up using in my blocks, in real-life the trees are much taller, and the tree blocks have much less negative space. I like the contrast in negative space between the tree blocks and the tent blocks.  I designed this quilt to be 90" x 105"  with the idea that quilting it would make it shrink a bit...and then washing and drying it would make it crinkle more.  We checked for size and it's a keeper (see below).

(Spoiler: the quilt finished so large & heavy that it won't fit in my washer...and who wants to go to a commercial laundromat if you don't have to right now).

I backed the quilt in silver minky, and had it quilted with "modern waves".  My kids all struggled to hold it up for me to take a photo - but we got it!  One day, when the pandemic is over, I'll venture out to wash this quilt and the crinkle will be amazing (and it won't be quite so huge).
Until then, it's being used and loved and that makes me happy.

This is going to be super quick, but I wanted to document that I liked making my last log-cabin quilt so much (see here), that I made another one!
For these blocks, I used gray and varying shades of blues with navy squares in the center.  I made this quilt one row longer, so it finishes around 60" X 72". Another difference with this quilt is that I backed this quilt with minky and had it quilted by my local long-arm quilter.

I used another shade of the Pezzy prints to bind this one - just like the spring green version.