Just another crazy week…

Wow! What a week! I hope your week was as full and crazy as mine! We started off with icy cold weather that closed schools and most businesses. My dental appointment was rescheduled from Monday to Thursday. My aunt and uncle, who live in Billings, MT had a whirl-wind schedule flying to Las Vegas, NV on Monday, then to Tulsa, OK on Tuesday  to pick up a vehicle  and then drove here to Norman to visit us for a couple of days. They headed back for home just before my rescheduled dental appointment.  I squeezed in a stop at the LQS for some black and white fabric as a reward for being such a good dental patient for our DIL! Lastly, we had a lovely dinner Friday with our friends who formerly lived on Maui.

Now in between all of that, I had the usual domestic diva stuff…laundry, clean house for company coming, buy food and spirits, cook a bit, keep the coffee pot brewing, let the dog in and out, buy more food, repeat cleaning…you know, the usual…but this gal needs another thing thrown in that mix…sewing!!  I have been struggling with a quilt  I found on Pinterest that a new client has commissioned me to make with Kaffe Fassett style fabrics!  At the bottom of a previous post, I showed off my fabrics here.

In between all the laughing and visiting, cleaning and errands, I scoured the Internet for a pattern…was it paper-pieced?…did the woman who posted the picture on her blog know the pattern?…I posted the photo on Facebook as an S.O.S. for all my quilty types…no luck. I got some great suggestions and found things similar but it ended up a trial and error attempt with my daughter and another quilter’s help.

It looked simple enough…it’s just  like a wonky, log cabin…or maybe a spinning log cabin…and here was my first attempt…

1st wonky log cabin

It’s not bad! I only trimmed the left side a bit short! In one suggestion, I was led to this site for a possible solution. It’s a Twisted Log Cabin found on a blog called Quilting Board. Well, I tried that and here is my second attempt…

2nd Wonky Log Cabin

Ooh! I like this! This is great…but… it came out much smaller…and…it is not square! *sigh* 😦

My daughter came in and made a copy of the photo in black and white so she could determine the actual block. When a block is wonky, it is kinda hard to tell. She discovered the center square is framed similar to a pattern called “Twist”…which is appropriate. I found that pattern at a site that offers free patterns called Quilter’s Cache here.

This “Twist” block needed to be adjusted down.  So I bravely jumped in, made some adjustments to my center square (which was from a charm pack and was NOT 5″ so I trimmed it to make it square) and that came out pretty well. Then after cutting that piece “wonky” I continued adding sides as you would a log cabin. Then I carefully whacked cut that “wonky”. The last row I repeated the process with the black fabrics and cut once again to make a 9-1/2″ unfinished block. I made 2 to make sure I could repeat the size and voila! Nailed it!

3rd & 4th Wonky Log Cabins

Whew! They aren’t “hard” to do…but they are time consuming and it does waste some fabric. The first round is the trickiest with the partial seam but the effect is the closest to the blocks in the photo of the quilt.  Then the subsequent rounds have to be cut so the corners leave enough seam allowance and so the wedges are uniform.

I proudly posted my success on a Facebook quilting group page and received kudos and requests to post the steps to do the block! Yesterday, I worked slowly and took lots of photos and I hope I can explain it. I made it through the first round before I had to take a break for dinner and a glass of wine! I will be back at it today and will try to post the process in two blogs in a few days so anyone wanting to attempt it can do so at their own peril leisure.

Hopefully, I can repeat this for 18 more blocks! BUT…you knew that was coming, right?…to make it “just like the picture”, I need want half of the blocks to tilt in the opposite direction! CRAZY! Hey, if it were easy, everyone would have the same quilts!!  That’s not how I do things!

Thankfully, I am making this as a bed runner. For a bigger quilt, I would have to find a bit more efficient way to make the block…and probably a few more breaks for wine! 😉

As we all recover from the time change, I hope you check back for the progress on this…it’s crazy and bright…and that’s how I roll…what’s not to like?!?! Well…the time change goes without saying, right! 🙂