This is my first attempt at a log cabin quilt. I just came back from a visit with my family and my mother in law showed me all of her finished quilts and i found every one of them inspiring. Mom had also allowed me some time going through her fabric stash. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning, such a guilty pleasure :). Needless to say, when we got home, i could hardly wait to get started on my new project, practicality won when i managed to get us unpacked first. I find i require a tidy space to get my creative juices flowing, sometime the creative pocess can in itself get a bit messy but i try to atleast get started with a tidy environment. The middle of a project can look like chaos to the untrained eye :) it is organized chaos and i am okay with that, it all gets tidied up in the end..
Anyways, mom has made some amazing log cabin quilts, i have to ask her permission to share some of these beauties with the quilt world as they are perfection, she has an eye for detail that is unsurpassed , all her points and seams are perfect, not to mention her use of colour or the hand quilting, OMG, the hand quilting is simply to die for. When i first started sewing a little over a year ago, i had had no idea just how talented this incredible woman is. My appreciation for her quilts continues to grow, i am blessed to have such an amazing teacher.
Anyway, I meant to try my hand at a light and dark log cabin quilt, where the log cabins orientation creates a dark and light diamond shapes. Mom had successfully done some really scrappy log cabins this way that i more or less fell in love with...My goal was to use all the fabrics mom had given me and anything from my own stash that would work....
So i started cutting strips at 1.5" and separated my lights and darks. Then i chain pieced 4 cabins to start. I was not pleased with the look, the fabrics just did nothing for each other, i wanted scrappy, but this was fugly looking. So i changed my colors and went to something a little safer for me- grey / white and navy, with the red center, this was way more to my liking. I chain pieced a dozen in these colors and was pleased. I hate to waste, and i still was not ready to abandon the scrappy look yet, at this point i was using more fabric from my stash, which was not the original plan. Let me just say , the fabrics i had gotten from mom are lovely, but somehow, when i pieced them together it was just wrong. Maybe, if i were to just keep piecing the fugly block would grow on me, but it is a lot of effort to make for something that was looking like it was going to be hideous. I know myself to get easily discouraged and knew how important it is to be pleased with the outcome of something i am just learning. So , the first block i finished was with my safe colours, the grey/white for the light side and the navy for the dark. Then i wanted to play around a bit with more colour and aimed for a scrappier block, again with my own fabrics i mixed it up a bit, there was not enough contrast and i was not pleased, funny thing is, it sat on the design wall for a couple days and i started to like the low contrast in that the star shape is so subtle up close as the fabrics are so loud that the star disappears, until you stand around ten feet or more away and then the star can is easily be seen. The over all look has grown on me. Now i am unsure as to what to do as far as, Should i make one large quilt? Or make a couple baby quilts or wall hangings?
Not sure yet...
I am really proud of these blocks, it is the first project that i have used my new quarter inch foot for, and wow what a difference, this is the first time things lined up for me as well as they did. Then squaring up the cabins before piecing the blocks , really does make huge difference, i could not believe how much i had ro shave off each cabin, it all adds up...
So many cool things to do with a log cabin, chain piecing is my new bff.
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