Monday, October 19, 2020

Half Log Cabin and Fabric Inspiration!


A tired dog in the sewing room is always a good thing!

I want to talk about Libby's comment last week.  She concluded with: "I let the fabric be the star."  This sentence really resonated with me and maybe it does for you!  

Whenever my friends and I visited our local fabric store, I would always tease:  See the fabric.  Smell the fabric.  Stroke the fabric.  Visiting a fabric store for many of us is a therapeutic experience.  The colors! The designs!  The samples!  INSPIRATION BABEE!
Fabric does inspire us!  I'm sad that I don't feel comfortable going to fabric stores but I have to look at the positive side of things.  These days I'm looking at my stash as my personal fabric store!

For probably the first half of my sewing years, fabric really dictated what I did with my sewing.  The internet has really opened up the craft/art world to other possibilities.  

Large scale fabric can be a problem for most quilter and I usually shy away from those prints.  Of coure there is always an exception and years ago, I fell in love with a poppy fabric.  I decided to feature the fabric with some zig zags of corresponding fabric and I failed.  The sashing I chose to use changed everything.

But failures lead to other opportunities!   I liked how it looked so I kept the design.  Because I didn't spend a lot of time on the internet at that point, I didn't realize people were calling it by a name.  It's an easy pattern called Half Log Cabin.

Sorry it's blurry but it's an old photo!

Anyway, I made a few different versions of this quilt with a few big print fabrics.  Another fun pattern for big prints are the BQ (Big Quilt) patterns; there is a quite a variety, see here.  

I had actually forgotten about these half log cabin patterns until I was on Instagram the other night and this image came up from someone called "Angela_beloved_quilter (don't ask me how, I really don't understand Instagram at all because I'm technically challenged--so much so that I have to use my camera to photograph what I want to remember).

What a fun scrap quilt!  Our friend Diann who frequents this blog has a wonderful blog called Little Penguin Quilts.  Each week she shares some of the blocks she makes, particularly for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (referred on many blogs as RSC). I find Diann's blog very inspiring and have long been intrigued by the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Each January, the challenge begins again.  Every month a different color is featured.  You can read about it here.  I'm thinking about joining this challenge in January and I'd like to use the little half log cabin for my pattern.

For some of our beginning quilters, this is an excellent pattern to try.  There are lot of free tutorials on the pattern (just google it).

Have a safe and happy day!











2 comments:

  1. I like this pattern a lot. I have followed the folks doing RSC for several years and finally jumped in with a small project this year. I don't have a blog so I don't take pictures but it's a start.

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  2. What fun to be reading along and realize that you mentioned me! I love participating in the RSC challenge because it gits my style of sewing - play with a few blocks each month, and have a quilt to finish towards the end of the year. I love scrappy quilts and not having to worry about matching colors, fabrics, or prints! Your idea for the half log cabins is perfect for this kind of quilt-making, Michele! In fact, those blocks are on my to-do list, too!

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