Simple Tied, Log Cabin Quilt Part One

hey Frances the miss Wolfie from our half acre homestead and today we're gonna start part one of a simple tide log cabin okay this is what a log cabin quilt looks like for some reason the first couple of takes I didn't realize my camera wasn't recording so I'm gonna run you through what I did at first a log cabin quilt is made of two sets of contrasting shades in fabric in this case it is whites and blues sort of now your this is one of my blocks which you're gonna I'm gonna take you through making now with a log-cabin quilt you basically start with an a contrasting color for your hearth stone and you build upon it going around and around and around with strips of fabric until you have what looks like a triangle of dark fabric and a triangle of light fabric and when they're sewed together they make this pattern or whatever pattern you want to put them together in now for this log cabin quilt obviously I have chosen browns and greens with a red center block we call that the hearth stone this is the most important part of your quilt the cutting because what happens is if your fabric is not perfectly straight then you're going to have issues later on down the road so now I have a nice straight seam down here a folded seam and I'm going to take the first cut this is just for demonstration purposes I am going to take the first cut and how I make sure that this is really really square is that I take my folded seam and I line it up with the line on the ruler and then I just cut it right off that means now that is perfectly square then we're going to slide our ruler up to exactly two and a half inches and again keep your line of your ruler and the line of your measurement so that they are exactly square that way when you unfold your fabric it doesn't matter what the end say this is perfectly straight with no wonky zigzags in it you're gonna leave all your light strips and dark strips in nice long strips because this is a strip quilt okay it's made with strips now going back to our lovely straight strip we still got it folded in half we are again we're going to line up let me see if I can get you a little closer here we are going to line up the edge of the fabric and you want it to be laid down perfectly straight with the line on your ruler and again we're gonna cut so that this the edge of your fabric is lined up and so it is across the top making your strips perfectly square then again we're gonna go this is the only one you pre-cut in squares because this is our center square and there they are perfect to it two and a half inch by two and a half inch center block squares okay the rest you're gonna leave in Nice piles of strips okay so I have about ten yards here so now it's all cut in strips and remember folks be really accurate with your cutting it makes your sewing together in the end so much easier so let's get started on our simple tied log-cabin okay folks we start with our small squares these are our Center squares and it's usually a contrast in color to what you're working with and I start I'm gonna start with dark because these are shorter pieces of fabric and you will be building your block just like a log-cabin the more the farther along you get the bigger it gets so we start with our short pieces first and this is really simple folks once you learn how to work with strips of fabric for quilts it gets so much easier so now what we're going to do is we're going to take one of our pieces of fabric yeah show you here and for the benefit of you folks I will pin it the first time I don't normally pin my fabric because well I've just been around about it for a long time so longer than I thought okay so here we have a nice piece of fabric and here are our starter blocks now we're going to take our starter blocks and we're going to start sewing them right sides of work facing to our first strip of fabric now just for the benefit of you folks I'm gonna pin these together so that you can see what I'm doing and what we're gonna do is as we go along we're just going to sew all these red blocks to the strip leaving just enough space in between the blocks for your rotary cutter do you don't need to draw a sewing line on your fabric if you're using a sewing machine and you can go by one of these little cut ends on your plate but once you decide which one you're going to use that's the one you have to use throughout the entire project because remember cutting and sewing has to be precise in order for you to have a nice square quill okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to take our strip and we're going to draw our presser foot down okay now what we have now is all these strips of fabric with our foundation block sewn to them and all we have to do now is cut them apart if your gap between your foundation blocks is too big then you're going to want to trim it because it has to be the same size as your foundation block see so we're just going to take that right to the edge trim that little bit off be really careful folks don't cut your foundation block okay so when I'm done this is what its gonna look like and now we take our blocks and we iron them open now folks you may think that this is not an important step but it is if you want your fabric to lay nice and flat when you sew the next strip on we want your seams and your blocks pressed flat it just makes the sewing and the squaring up so much easier now this is called a log-cabin because you build on all around the outside one kind of log at a time but the way this works is you have dark on two sides and then light on two sides so since we started with the dark next to the hearth stone we're going to now the next one has to be perpendicular to the other dark block so all I'm going to do is again I'm going line the fabric up you can pin it if you like if you're new at this I strongly recommend you pin it but I just I work better with less restrictions on so you can line it up and then you line it up to where you're cutting seam is and we are just going to sew this to the next strip now you can see why I use the shorter dark strips first because as your block gets bigger you're going to need longer strips and when I have all of my pieces sewn to strips okay now what I should have done before folks is I should have I made a mistake it's been a while this are these are my squares which have now been sewed onto the next strip and before I cut them I'm gonna iron them open I don't know why I didn't remember this this makes things so much easier once your block has been ironed open and it makes it so much easier to cut you line up the edge of your outside of your block to align on your ruler and then bring your ruler just to the edge of your last cut fabric you don't want to be recutting this fabric you just want to cut the strip that it is attached to just like that and there we go our blocks are all done their first double row of darks now this is important for you to notice okay because it's always done in twos so here we have our Center block and then we have dark going one way and dark going another now we're going to go light and light so let's get on with the first light though and we're just going to continue to do this exactly the way we started the only thing that can get tricky is when you are forgetting not paying attention to which way your direction is going and we're going to walk light light and then dark dark these need to be right sides facing so your pattern is up and this is the way we want it to go because there's the center block okay and again we're always going to use the same measurement for every single time let me see if I can get you guys a little bit closer and that our fabric is either pinned precisely in place or held precisely in place now I've just set this on the white fabric but I've put a pin through all three are all the layers just so that I can do this one-handed and show you while holding the camera my fabric is lined up to the edge of the presser foot it is precisely lined up with the fabric underneath and it's right sides of work facing and then I'm just going to it all the way down to the next one rinse and repeat ok so now we're going to do our second light strip now the way you're going to see this work its way out you can see this as it's just resting there against it it's going to be there's your Center or what we call the hearthstone of the log cabin quilt is your very first square that's why we like it a contrasting color so that we can build around it okay so we have dark dark and now we're going to have light light and as long as you always have two sides dark and two sides light and they equal in number your block will be square okay so as you can see here we have lined it up on the sewing machine there's our hearth stone and this is the last time you're going to use your hearth stone block as your guide and it's up against the second layer of light now the reason this is the last time we're going to use our hearth stone as a guide is because it will now be completely surrounded by the logs so to speak and again if you have problems with sewing straight as many beginning beginners do folks I've been at this a long time you should always pin the seams of your block so that it's always flush and straight to your founder and again you can see I'm using the presser foot as and remember always have your blocks facing in the same direction that you're sewing every time so we have dark hearthstone light so the next one is of course going to be dark hearthstone light it's the only way to be positive that your blocks are going in the right direction so I'm almost done cutting but I want to show you something I have two piles going here now I thought I needed more but really all I need is two because the next piece of fabric is going to go on this side it's going to be another dark and as you can see these are both prints and on every one of these blocks we're going to butt up against a solid either here or here there's a solid there's a solid and the reason I'm putting these in two piles is so that when I go to sew on the next piece this pile I can pick up if I'm you if I'm sewing on a solid piece I'll just pick from this pile or if I'm working with a print I'll pick from this pile I know I'm a little OCD about prints and solids but I mean when it comes right down to it you'll know what I'm talking about when I start putting it together so we don't have solids up against solids I'm all I have to do is choose whether to choose or to decide whether to choose brown or green depending see this bugs me this bugs me this is it you know and it only happened for a couple of blocks but it does are the prints that I have laid out for this set of blocks remember I told you it's just gone whatever has either here or here as a solid and that way all I have to do whoops let's just pick one block all I have to do is pick the print that I'm going to use next according to how it's going to look to the block obviously I'm not going to use that one because that one's there I'm gonna sew these strips on the outside here and every time you add a section and a sec a right-angle section which is one strip in one strip you end up with a square so I mean every time it's all your block if you're doing this right your block is always going to be square right now it's a rectangle because I still have one more strip today okay here is one of our blocks that has the last band of dark on it and we're going to be once I have these all cut up because you see these need to be trimmed flush then we're going to start with the last of the light colors and I'm not going to take you through that because you've seen enough to know what I'm going to be doing but the first white one is going to have to go on the one where it's got the shortest light one see how this one's bigger so this is the side we do first and I'm just gonna lay fabric down so that you can see how I go so once I once I sew a light colored fabric down all the sides of this and then iron them out and I trim them then I'm going to take another light fabric and sew it on there now you get to see what I'm talking about when we talk about how it looks almost triangular you've got a half a block that's dark and a half a block that's light all right so I'm gonna get back to work and when I have all these blocks together I'm going to show you that'll probably be the end of yeah as you can see I have finished my blocks and you can tell that they look like they are almost diagonally cut in half between light and dark okay we have around our center hearthstone which I deliberately made in an offset color so you could see we have too dark here and too dark here too light here and too light here we're gonna iron these and we will be ready for step two this is the missive OFI from our half acre homestead saying stay tuned for part two of our simple tide log cabin quilt take care bye bye

Channel: OurHalfAcreHomestead

Views: 10,676

Rating: 4.9474835 out of 5

Keywords: Quilt (Literature Subject), Quilting, Simple, sewing, crafting, crafts, OurHalfAcreHomestead

Id: TG0gmW9lVbk

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2015