Cabin Sweet Cabin - Project Quilting

"Cabin Sweet Cabin," 20" x 20", made for Project Quilting, Focus Through the Prism, Challenge 3: Log Cabin, July 2015 in Yellow Springs, Ohio

This is my third entry in the Project Quilting "Focus Through the Prism" challenge. To play along you need to purchase a ROYGBIV hand-dyed bundle of fabric from Cherrywood Fabrics and then at the beginning of the month a traditional quilting block is selected. Participants get to chose which of the seven focus fabrics they want to emphasize for the month, but other fabrics can be added.

All quilts will be made 20" x 20" with the intention of displaying them together in the future.

July's block is "Log Cabin."

When creating a traditional Log Cabin block, you start with a square in the center (traditionally red to represent the hearth being the center of the home but it can be any color), then sew it to another square the same size. Rotating a quarter turn and add a rectangle that is 2x as wide as the original square, rotate a quarter turn and add another rectangle that is also 2x as wide. Rotate a quarter turn and this time add a rectangle that is 3x the original and so on all the way around until the block is the size that you want it.

Traditionally the left and top sides would be shades of one color family and the right and bottom would be shades of another color family and the way you pieced the blocks would create different patterns, so there is a lot of variety in Log Cabin quilts.

This block also works well for paper piecing, especially if it is a small block. I once made a quilt that had 35 Log Cabin blocks and each log was only 1/4" thick.

I wanted my design to be similar to "Monkey Tail" and "A Second Self" the other two quilts I've made for the Focus Through the Prism challenges and my first thought was to make the first five pieces black so it would have a black center like the other two quilts, then just go around with my colored fabric and I'm done. Only I played around with some other ideas and came up with one that I liked better, even thought it would require four times the amount of pieces.

I tried to talk myself out of doing the more complicated design but I just kept coming back to the fact that I liked it more.

Unlike the first two projects this time I fused the color pieces that were just a shade darker and/or lighter to the Cherrywood fabric before I pieced it since each of my logs are only 1" thick. The color I chose for this one is purple so I used that for the outermost logs (which are bigger than the others) and I also added purple logs behind the red ones.

I used the same border fabric and couched a piece of black yarn, this time in an arrangement that represented the smoke coming up out of a chimney. Then I quilted black quilting lines that echoed the yarn at 1/4" apart.

I used a knife-edge facing to bind the quilt.

More about Cabin Sweet Cabin and my Focus Through the Prism series

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Click on any of the photos to see larger images.

To read more about Project Quilting's Focus Through the Prism, go here.

To see other entries for this challenge, visit the Log Cabin link up.