A New Old Log Cabin quilt project

A few months ago a quilter from the San Francisco Bay Area offered to give me several old
issues of Quilters Newsletter magazine. She dropped them off at the shop one day while I was away. What a great surprise it was! Several binders with magazines from the early 1970's on up into the 1990's! It was so cool to see first hand the changes that the magazine, and quilting in general, has gone through. I found a lot of great articles and wonderful quilt projects. I was
particularly drawn to this log cabin variation, in all of it's Brown glory!

It was offered as a series quilt in six issues of the magazine. The designer was Ruth Meyer
from Kansas. The issue I found it in was February of 1988 - the last one of the series! Just my luck! The previous issues were all missing from this donated collection. Rats. So I tracked them down on good old eBay until I had the whole series.

I had this idea of offering it as a Block of the Month for 2011 at my shop. They gave Ms. Meyer's contact info in the back of the magazine so even though it was 22 years old I gave it a try & I found her! Yay! I was actually able to order several copies of her original pattern. I've been involved in some discussions recently about copyright so I was really happy to honor her as the original designer and purchase directly from her. You are actually not supposed to copy patterns from old magazines without getting permission from the designers, especially for the purpose I had in mind.

While I happen to really like brown, I decided to make my sample of the quilt in blues for the Log Cabins and scrappy colors for the Sampler Blocks. This should be more to the taste of contemporary quilters and still have the very traditional look that I love.

So here are the first two Sampler Blocks surrounded by their Log Cabin settings. It's a work in progress on the design wall, so just ignore the 1930s patchwork off to the left. I actually did the Bear's Paw while I was at work - it's a pretty easy one. All the pieced sampler blocks are just floating around next to the log cabins for now.

I had never done a Nosegay block before. I researched it a little and found that it was very popular in the 30s! It is a bit of a challenge to make, but there it is. Ruth Meyer's templates
are quite accurate (remember it was 1987 - pre-rotary popularity) so the pieces did go together.
As I work on the blocks I am writing rotary cutting directions & sewing directions, and have figured out that some of these blocks will have a class or demonstration for the program I offer.

And that was before I tackled the next block, Crown of Thorns. Yikes! It wasn't that it was particularly difficult. I just made a little error when adding seam allowances & making measurements for rotary cutting. So it took a few tries over several hours to get it right.

I have given myself a goal of having a few blocks together to display at a quilt show in my town this weekend. So I'm working along at it, having fun with it and trying not to stress. It sure helps when the blocks turn out nicely. I can hardly wait to actually stitch the log cabins to the blocks. What I'm waiting for is: I wanted to have a variety of the blue outside logs to choose from so they look good when they touch the next set of blocks.

After I had three I just had to go on to one more because the next one looked a little easier. Ruth calls it the Twisted Star. I've actually found all the blocks in Barbara Brackman's Encyclopedia
of Pieced Quilt Patterns. They are wonderfully traditional and were popular in the 30s - an area of interest to me recently. More on that topic in another blog.

And here all all four together, so far, ready to be stitched together for the show Saturday. It's pretty exciting for me to have several local quilters jazzed about this and signed up to start in January. That means that I can keep working on it for fun and for work - best thing about my job!
Some of the next blocks will have greens, yellow, brown and whatever looks good! I'll keep putting them up as they get done. In my usual impatient way I'll be trying out a few of those cute small cabins for the border. Might as well get going on them - there's a bunch to do.