Paisley half log cabin

 

As mentioned at the end of my log cabin post a few months back, I quite enjoyed doing a less complicated quilt for a change, i.e. one with nothing but squares and rectangles.  And I was quite keen to use up a half layer cake of paisley fabric squares that I think I received after one of mum or grandma's trips to the US at some point.

Given I only had 20 10-inch squares, (of 10 different fabrics), it took a long time to figure out what quilt pattern I was going to make with them.  For a while I thought I had settled on a smaller version of a jacobs ladder or similar, until I redid the maths and realised the amount of fabric I had was not going to work out.  Eventually, and around the time I was doing the log cabin, I found the Log CATin pattern by AGF Studio.  It was basically a half log cabin block, but cleverly cut the same way from both a print and a plain 10-inch square, so that you ended up with two blocks that were the inverse of each other.  But what I also liked about the pattern was the sort of symmetrical, reverse image layout.

Now, 20 layer cake squares were still definitely not enough to make the quilt as illustrated.  That was fine with me, I just liked the idea and concept and was happy to raid the stash and do more maths.  I eventually figured out I could both make the quilt smaller and get rid of all the negative space in the quilt - I liked it, but I liked the block more - then add in six more fabrics that I could cut two 10-inch squares from each, and then pair my 32 layer cake squares with a coordinating fabric.  And as luck would have it, I had just enough of a matching grey to cut the required 32 coordinating squares.  Now don't ask me why I had a bit over 2 metres of a grey solid in my stash.  Must have been a reason at some point.  But definitely came in handy as I didn't end up spending anything to put this quilt top together.

Cutting the 10 inch squares and sewing them back together was mostly straightforward.  Turned out some of the pre-cut layer cake squares were a bit less than 10 inches on one side, so I made some seams a bit skinnier to compensate. But all just straight lines and fun to put together. 

The next bit of fun was figuring out the layout.  It had to be 8 x 8 to fit with the amount of fabric I had put together and the blocks I ended up with, and I did take inspiration from the original design and tried to do the reverse symmetrical layout thingy.  I also kept the darkest blocks to the centre of the quilt as well like in the original design as well.  Eventually after a bunch of swapping blocks around I decided to leave them as they ended up and put them together before they could get accidentally rearranged.

I already knew how I wanted to quilt this, and once I had some time, it was just a matter of figuring out how to actually do it, and how much.  I've done half inch spaced concentric circles before, but that was intensive and time consuming (and worth it for that quilt!), and while I was interested in circles again for this one, I wanted it to spiral, rather than be individual circles, so I didn't have to stop so much.  I also wanted the quilting to be a bit looser.  So I quilted a circle spiraling out from the centre to the edges of the quilt in black 40 weight Aurifil (was in the stash), with the lines of the spiral spaced 2 inches apart from eeach other.  Then I grabbed some blue 50 weight Aurifil (again, in the stash), and quilted another spiraling circle, but this time starting off centre, and not quite extending to the centre of the quilt.  I then did a third spiral circle in a random unknown green, but very shiny, thread (again, stash), quilting diagonally opposite to the blue one.  I am not sure you can see the colour difference much, but it was fun to do. There is no difference on the back, the bobbin was all grey Aurifil.

Seeing as the quilt got pulled in circles through the machine quite a bit (and sometimes with a cat sitting annoyingly on it), the quilt needed a good iron and steam into shape before trimming and binding with more paisley fabric.

This was a fairly straightforward quilt to put together, and the quilting wasn't highly technical, but I enjoyed all the bits of it.  I am already onto using another layer cake sitting in the stash to make a pattern I've been interested in for a while, though half square triangles are required in a minor, key capacity. 

Photos were again taken at the large park across the road from work, but at a different spot this time.  It was the first completely sunny, non-rainy day in ages, so I had to take advantage of the warm weather before the rain comes back.