Curved Log Cabin Tutorial

I have been seeing lots of log cabin blocks on Instagram lately… the scrappy Bonnie & Camille fabric log cabin block swap just looked divine!

So I have been hankering to play with my B&C scraps and log cabins.

And then I saw a curved log cabin block…. OMG…. I loved it! I can’t remember whose feed I saw it on first, but I found a Missouri Star Quilt Company youtube tutorial from ages ago that has something like I wanted to try. And Jenny Doan has just done a reboot of that tutorial this last weekend!

I changed it a little bit (typical me!) so that each quarter block finishes at 11.5″ so when you put four of them together to get the ‘circle’ it is 22.5″ square block. Great big beautiful blocks!

The ‘trick’ to making it look a bit like a circle is to use different width strips in your log cabin.

To make it easy for myself, for the colours I used a 2.5″ wide strip (great way to use up left over jelly roll strips!) and the background I used 1.5″ wide strips in low volume.

I had a ball going through all my Bonnie and Camille red scraps and cutting the strips required. Seriously, the choosing of fabrics was the most time consuming part of this… the sewing is pretty easy!

Here are the cutting instructions I used that relate to the numbers in the diagram above for one quarter of the full block. So to make a full block you will need to cut FOUR of each of these sizes.

1.   2.5” square in colour
2.   2.5” x 1.5” in background
3.   1.5” x 3.5” in background
4.   3.5” x 2.5” in colour
5.   2.5” x 5.5” in colour
6.   5.5” x 1.5” in background
7.   1.5” x 6.5” in background
8.   6.5” x 2.5” in colour
9.   2.5” x 8.5” in colour
10.   8.5” x 1.5” in background
11.   1.5” x 9.5” in background
12.   9.5” x 2.5” in colour
13.   2.5” x 11.5” in colour

And this is what it looks like when you sew your four quarters together into the full block. Suddenly the ‘circle’ appears and it looks fantastic!

Cannot wait to make more of them – enough for a whole quilt back to go with one of my double sided quilts 🙂

I have also worked out a smaller version too so that the finished block isn’t quite so huge. Great for smaller projects and ‘fillers’ in a sampler quilt perhaps?

1.   1.5″ square in colour
2.   1.5″ x 1″ in background
3.   1″ x 2″ in background
4.   2″ x 1.5″ in colour
5.   1.5″ x 3″ in colour
6.   3″ x 1″ in background
7.   1″ x 3.5″ in background
8.   3.5″ x 1.5″ in colour
9.   1.5″ x 4.5″ in colour
10.   4.5″ x 1″ in background
11.   1″ x 5″ in background
12.   5″ x 1.5″ in colour
13.   1.5″ x 6″ in colour

This makes a 6″ square block and you will need to make FOUR of these to create the curved log cabin block.
This will be a 11.5″ unfinished curved log cabin block.

And yes, these are some pretty small pieces to be sewing with! Pressing between each strip is important- just take your time 🙂

This tutorial has been part of my Scrappy July month on @52Quilters over on Instagram. Myself and three other quilters are showcasing how we manage scraps, what we actually define ‘scraps’ as and how we use them in our projects.