I knew my assignment this semester was to be based on the Log Cabin pattern. I pondered for months what I could do with a log cabin, not being a quilter. Well, I still don't know, so I guess its quilting for me. Besides, half the fun of taking a course is being challenged to work outside of your comfort zone, right?
It's not quilting in general that doesn't appeal to me, I think it's more the piecing- cutting perfectly good fabric into geometric shapes and sewing it all back together to make a single piece of fabric,ugh. I'm partial to paint. Piecing is precise-and I am most certainly not. I can't cut a straight line even with a rotary cutter and grid-marked mat.
Deciding exactly what to design out of log cabin blocks satisfyingly fell into place for me. Around Christmas I bought a copy of Leni Levenson Wiener's book, Photo-Inspired Art Quilts. While the book didn't teach me anything specific I didn't already know, seeing the step by step process of taking a picture and turning it into an art quilt was inspiring (and I love her art quilts because they aren't pieced!). I am going to sit down and work through her process with one of my photos sometime-maybe after I'm done this log cabin project.
Trying to stay focused on log cabins, I sat down in front of the computer and searched "log cabin quilt". I spent several hours looking through thousands of pictures of beautiful quilts. Really beautiful quilts to be seen, but none of them inspired anything out of me. I was still too focused on wanting to make a picture and not a design if that makes sense. Just as I started thinking, maybe I shouldn't take the class this semester and focus on what I want to do, I found
Flavin Glover's website
http://www.flavinglover.com/. Her homepage had pictures some lovely log cabin quilts and something even better-a tab titled "Pictorial Log Cabins"! If ever there was a time to shout "Eureka!" that was it. Pictures out of log cabins! I could really make a picture out of log cabin blocks. I love her piece, "Geese in Flight"-colours changing throughout a single log.
The problem with this pictorial log cabin method is of course that you have to be able to draw a simple picture and I'm not a drawer either. I made friends with a pencil and a large eraser, sat down with a sheet of graph paper and eventually ended up with a drawing of a puffin. I squared off all the round edges of the bird as if it were a cross-stitch pattern and eventually had a simple pattern I can work with. I did it, I drew a bird!
Fun's over now though. I thought I'd start with the easy part. 15 blocks are all sky, so I began with those. Log cabin blocks are supposed to be "easy, a great block for beginning quilters". I struggled with the first set of instructions I read on how to construct on of these blocks-not a good sign. Once I figured it out, I made one and found out just how straight I can't cut with that ruler and rotary cutter. 15 sky blocks are done now, but I don't think a single one of them is the same size nor am I convinced that any are perfectly square either. If I could start over, I think I should have foundation
pieced this, but it's too late for that now. If I can't handle these blocks with solid logs, the logs with changing colours are going to be a real disaster. Normally I'd be happy to call a project a failure because I've enjoyed the process, but I haven't enjoyed the process of piecing these 15 blocks together at all. Maybe I was a little over ambitious with this one and should have just done something with "wonky" log cabins. I am stubborn though, and failure isn't an option, so I'll be sharing how the puffin project progresses.
