A Curvy Log Cabin Quilt

There's something about a log cabin quilt . . .

I subscribe to emails from Donna Jordan of Jordan Fabrics. Her free video tutorials, where she whips up (or "stitches up" as she says) a quilt so fast, are real confidence builders. More than once I have made a quilt without buying or using a pattern. I just follow along with Donna's video.

When I saw her tutorial for this Curvy Jelly Roll Log Cabin quilt, I said, Aha! This was my chance to use a jelly roll I had bought a year earlier. Quotation, a line of modern fabrics by Brigitte Heitland, comes in these snappy, bright colors, and I'd been dying to use them for something worthy.

According to the Textile Research Centre, a research foundation in The Netherlands, log cabin quilts were made in England and Ireland in the second half of the 19th century, but the pattern has been associated with North American quilts, especially during the American Civil War. Quilters have been playing around with light and dark fabrics to make log cabin blocks and then arranging the blocks in various ways to make a wide variety of shapes and patterns.

I arranged my log cabin blocks into a couple of different designs, sent photos to my sisters and the consensus was this giant flower design.

I love the contrast of the white, black, bright orange, spring green and sunny yellow.

This quilt has an outdoorsy look to me. I hope it's used for picnics in the park.

The fabric that looks like jacks is one of my favorites.

I love the mash-up of a traditional quilt design with ultra-modern fabrics.

Backing is in Ellipses, one of the Quotation fabrics.

Curvy Log Cabin lives at our lake house until it can find its forever home.

I added a scrappy border from my scraps from the quilt top.

The flowery quilting really shows up on the black.

🦆

To learn more about these quilts and Diane's other quilting projects, contact her at diane.fitzpatrick@mac.com. And check out her Instagram page.

Comments

Back at It!

It's not that I haven't been making quilts. While 2023 was a slower year for me, quilt-wise, I did manage to churn out four major quilts and some smaller projects. It was a busy year: Two international trips and some domestic travel, my son's wedding, summers at the lake, and a new job for me. But my sewing room kept up a persistent -- and loud -- siren song. I attended QuiltCon last year and took classes to make two quilts: a selvedge quilt and a very modern quilt with solids, both paper-pieced and both by Amy Friend . They were ambitious projects and it took me almost a year to finish them. (More to come on the pitfalls I suffered with that modern Gulls quilt god help me why do I do this to myself I'm an idiot.) So while last year wasn't as productive as my first three years of quilting, the quilts I did make were major. The bed-sized quilt I made for my son and his wife was a modern but scrappy double wedding ring quilt in which I incorporated pieces of lace fro

My Original Rainbow Quilt

In early 2021, I had only been quilting about a year, but thanks to the pandemic, I had already amassed a pretty big fabric stash. I decided to make an entire quilt without purchasing any new fabric. I was going to use up some of these scraps, doggone it! Make room for some new purchases! If you're a quilter, you know that's not how it works. No matter how big the quilt, your scraps seem to multiply, despite how much you use. It's a sewing room miracle. But back to the story. I drew up a design of my own, kind of a wonky log cabin block. I wanted to make a rainbow of colors that transitioned through the rainbow in a nice gradual flow. This is going to be a long-term project, I thought. I'm not going to rush through this like a maniacal sweatshop foreman. Here, I'm going to put all my different colored scraps over here in this big box in the corner and I'll just bring it over to the table when I want to work on it for a few minutes. In the meantime I have all t

A Special Kind of Memory Quilt

Dianne and I had a special friendship. The kind that is borne from being a stay-at-home mom with babies, toddlers and preschoolers, where you consider yourself lucky if you can find one kindred spirit, one other mom with whom you can share your heart, your soul, and as many laughs as you can afford. We shared so many adventures, and now that she's gone, there are stories too many to count. Twenty years after her death, Dianne's stepmother, Linda, and daughter, Jasmine, were going through a box of sewing projects that Linda had stashed away. They came across "the infamous shirt-and-tie-quilt," a quilt that Dianne was working on while she was fighting her last battle with cancer. No one liked the quilt, not even Dianne. Especially not Dianne. "All she did was complain about that quilt," Jasmine told me. "We all got tired of hearing about how much she hated the stupid shirt-and-tie-quilt." No one wanted the quilt, not even Dianne's husband, fo

Search This Blog