Little Cabin in the Woods

It is difficult to keep a secret from a loyal reader. For this quilt, my brother and I conspired against my dad to make a Father's Day quilt. He is rather difficult to shop for and often says he only wants a card. I suggested this idea, and my brother loved it. He would buy the materials, and I would put in the work, so the quilt would be from both of us.

Dad has a cabin in the woods of the Wet Mountains near Westcliffe (really a nice house, but we call it a cabin). I've been wanting to make a log cabin quilt for his cabin for years. Dad's favorite colors for decorating are forest green and tan or brown. The brown section of the fabric store was a bit to dark and none of the fabrics would do the nice stepping from color to color, so I went a little more on the cream side. It will still match the furniture he stained. The blue is mostly my addition because there are so many beautiful blue sky out there.

Log cabin blocks are crazily versatile when it comes to layouts. It's especially true if you do a 36 block square king. I took a bunch of pictures to prove this point, but really, these options are only the tip of the iceberg. These first two are zigzag, and the one I thought I would most like.

Notice how just setting the zigzag off by one block can change the look of the quilt. The lighting in these pictures is not the greatest, which I think makes it a bit harder to see how the patterns work or don't work well with the fabric. My middle dark is a bit more olive than it looks in real life. If I were to go with a zigzag,  I would pick the first one, because both seem to make the cream stand out more than the green, and I like how it is balanced in the first picture more than the second.

With the diamonds, again I laid it out to show both the green and the cream focused.

And again, I think it looks a bit better with the cream than with the green.

This block pattern is called pinwheel. I did this for one other quilt and I liked the look of it for that one. For my dad and for this set of fabrics, I felt it was a bit too turbulent.

Fields and Farrows is a common block lay out. I've done it several times, but mostly on small quilts.

This is my typical go-to on a square quilt - Barn Raising. It doesn't work well on a rectangular quilt and doesn't work at all on an odd-numbered block quilt.

To me, doing the same direction on all blocks is a boring kind of pattern. One of the reasons I love log cabin quilts is that by rotating the block, you get the secondary pattern. To me, this just looks like a "normal" block and an average quilt.

Arrow is another interesting option. This works well as long as you have an even number of blocks width wise.

 So... my final choice? None of the above. I liked the diamonds the best, but it was not turbulent enough... it looked too plain, so I decided to make the center diamond the opposite color. I considered making it like a nine patch of diamonds, but it was a little too turbulent. I think this has just the right amount of action to keep the eye moving, but enough peace to let it rest.

The colors in these photos are much closer to real life. There is still a bit of olive, but it doesn't quite jump out as much as the flash showed.

 Since I moved, I don't have a plushy grass to take my photos in or a nice clothesline to tie up, so I had to settle for the gravel and a lint roller.

I also had some trouble in the final steps. My floor was smaller than the quilt. If I make a lot of king sized quilts, I may have to move some furniture. This quilt was approximately 110 x 110.