I signed up for Craftsy Unlimited a week or so ago and started watching a couple of the quilting classes. One was log cabin blocks with Marti Michelle. She made it look so easy so I ordered her rulers, picked out my fat quarters from this month's bundle from Quilt in a Day and then waited for the rulers to arrive. They came yesterday ( yes, on a Sunday) but since we had the baseball game to go to with some of our family, it had to wait until today.
I watched the video again.. well, I skipped some because I just wanted to see how to do it, not listen to her go on about other 'stuff'... I laid out my fat quarters in the order she said... dark on bottom, med next, then light and then the last medium and with the selvage edge to my right. I cut the 1.5" strips very carefully just like she showed. I then turned the strips and started cutting them in alphabetical order - just like she told me to... and I laid everything out in the order she said ( the pic above minus the center block and two rows) and proceeded to sew them in the order she said. That's when I started having problems... some of the strips were not quite long enough, some bowed in the middle after I finger pressed them... she says to only press them with the iron every four strips.
Then when I got about half way done, suddenly the strips were too long and needed trimming after being sewn. That was ok, I could deal with that even if it wasn't the way she told me to do it.
I got to where I only needed to add two strips to each block and I decided it was time for dinner. After dinner and some time spent helping a friend obtain fabric she'd been wanting, I decided I'd go back in and try to get the blocks done... there's only four - how much worse could it get? Worse than I expected but still not too bad... I found that I had sewn the wrong strip on the wrong side of a block ( or two) and had to remove them so that I could get them sewn into the right row and then move on to finishing with the last four strips....
Done! All four blocks are sewn together... now, I just need to quilt and bind. As I was walking out of my sewing room, I saw some yardage that I think will work perfectly for the backing and binding. YAY!
Now I just need to finish the star quilt that's on Mo'e so that I can take it off and put this one on & get it out of the way. Yes, there are SEVERAL quilts waiting in line to be quilted, but this one won't take long... I'm just going to do something to reinforce all the seam ends so that they hopefully won't come unstitched ( some were REALLY tiny on one side of the seam)
So the lesson of this adventure is... I'm a lousy piecer when it comes to log cabins and I need to stick to just doing paper pieced ones. Then, again, there are four more fat quarters left in the bundle and I could try again... maybe I could figure out what I did wrong... either way, my Marti Michelle log cabin rulers are going up for sale - one is brand new; never used and the other was just used today and might get used a second time. They are good rulers and Marti Michelle is a good instructor - I'm just a lousy log cabin piecer.
On that note, I'm headed to bed....
ttyl
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