Saturday, August 25, 2007

Finally, here are some pictures of the log cabin project Brigitte and I are working on. It was Brigitte's idea and she made this first block (I snaffled it from her when she came to Hamburg).
The two below are ones I made, after finally figuring out a way to foundation piece them on fabric (without paper--paper didn't work for me at all) so the strips wouldn't be stretched out of shape. You wouldn't think log cabins could be so complicated, but these are 12" blocks and the strips were mainly cut across the grain, which made them extreeemely stre-e-etchy.

This bottom one I did without foundation piecing, and you can see the problem a little, although some were much worse.

The latest batch of strips I cut, I made sure to cut lengthwise,
with the grain, even if it meant much shorter strips, just to avoid the stretching nightmare i had in the beginning.

The other big challenge for me is deciding on such a long row of fabric strips to put together for each block, making sure that
a) they all fit our color scheme,
b) there's enough contrast and variation between lights and darks / cools and warms
c) i'm not repeating my favorite fabrics too often
d) i don't run out of certain colors, since many of these hues (e.g. that warm, light red, these soft blues, the apricot) I don't tend to have in my stash.

However, I think this joint project is broadening my horizons in some ways. I admire Brigitte's sense of color, so it's interesting to try to imagine whether she would approve of various combinations.

1 comment:

Brigitte said...

I am excited where we will go with this project :-). Dear Nettie, I admire as well how you combine fabrics and you are often matching my taste or inspiring me with your freshness in choice (does one say so :-)?).