Lap blanket

My parents live in a fairly rural area of central California.  Not so rural that you can't see the neighbors, but the people around the corner keep sheep and alpacas and up the road is a heard of long horn cattle.  The town is more like a village, and they live in what passes for a suburb.

One of their neighbors, a couple just a few years older than they are, have become good friends, particularly of my dad.  The husband helped quite a lot with my post-wedding brunch, makes amazing cinnamon walnut bread at the holidays, and was just diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer.

There's not much any of us can do to help, he's undergoing treatment and seems to be in good spirits.  But wanting to offer what comfort I can from so far away, I decided to make him a lap quilt he can take with him to his treatments or just use at home.  A good friend of mine and fellow quilter on this side of the country is going through the same thing with her dad, and she very kindly shared some of the scraps from his quilt to supplement what I already had for my project.  We both like the continuity of that, somehow it seems as though they will both benefit from the prayers and well wishes directed at the other.

I decided to keep things fairly simple as I want to get this quilt sent out as quickly as I can.  Starting with a basic strip quilt idea, I added in some scrappy log cabin squares, strewn across a strip ground.  This was my first attempt at log cabin and I think the results were quite good.  They are kind of fun to do to, even though I felt like I was doing a whole lot of ironing.  I went with blue and green batiks for the strips, partly because that's what I had, but they seems like healing, calm colors.  The log cabin squares are done in darker shades with bits of brown thrown in, sort of like stepping stones in a stream.

Today I will quilt and bind the blanket and hopefully be able to get it mailed off by Wednesday.