Saturday, July 2, 2016

Playing with fabric...

We've been busy and we really are getting things caught up around here. We've also seen three grandson baseball games - there is only one left and that is next week. Our younger son and his family closed this past week on their new house and the work has begun. We helped a couple of days and will do more next week - I might have childcare duty a day or two which will be fun, of course! I don't really mind tearing down wallpaper or pulling up tack strips, nails, and staples after carpeting is removed either - my jobs so far. Mostly, I just enjoy helping.

Today I decided that I had to get in the sewing room for a little while. While we were gone, I heard an idea for sewing a couple squares of striped fabrics that resulted in a log cabin block.

The idea was to cut two squares of a striped fabric, put the fabrics right sides together with the stripes of one being horizontal and the other being vertical. Make half square triangles. Draw a diagonal line from corner to corner and sew 1/4" on either side of the line. Cut on the drawn line and iron the two pieces open. 

I tried it out with this fabric and it worked fine. I'm not sure if I'll use this block so it's not pressed and the second block is still attached.

This is the fabric that I wanted to use and the above method does not work because the stripes are different sizes, I think. The only place the stripes met was at the drawn line.

So, I cut squares from the same part of the fabric design and carefully cut each square diagonally in half using the 45 degree line on the ruler. Then I sewed two triangles one horizontal stripes and one vertical stripes together matching the stripes. The result is the same as making half square triangles with a little extra cutting.

Two squares result in 4 triangles which give two blocks when sewn together.

Ok, the idea works! Now what do I do for a layout? I considered a zigzag pattern...

or maybe a different design.

I'm not really sure but I'll figure out something one of these days. It was just fun to spend time in the studio playing with fabric.

3 comments:

  1. What a cool idea! I can't wait to see what you decide to do with them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Neat idea. Looking forward to seeing what the fabric decides it wants to look like.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've been thinking of doing that with some of my stripes. One of these days.....

    ReplyDelete

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