People who swear they know nothing about quilts will often recognize the old standard: The Log Cabin quilt. The quilt speaks of home and hearth, farming furrows, barn raisings, simpler times that revolved around family and home. The traditional block begins with a red center block to represent the hearth of the home or heart of the family. It is a pattern recognized around the world.
Variations
By varying the color or the width of the strips you can change the entire look of the pattern. Variations include furrows, diamonds, court house steps, pinwheels, barn raising, sunshine and shadows, well, there seem to be an infinite way of organizing the pieces in a log cabin quilt. Art quilters find this a pattern easy to jump off into a new realm of unreality or easy to distort into something new and original. A change of color, width, or geometric adjustment leads to a totally new look.
The Barn Raising variation resembles a Trip Around the World design only with Log Cabin technique. It makes a great basis for an art or illusion quilt.
Log Cabin Quilt History
Eleanor Burns increased the popularity of the Log Cabin pattern in the early 1980s with her first 'Quilt-in-a-Day' how-to book featuring a strip pieced, quick to make Log Cabin version.
The Log Cabin pattern seems as American as apple pie and hot dogs. Quilt groups across the country and around the world have turned to the Log Cabin quilt pattern as a logo or name of their organizations. Although we like to think of it as American, Jane Hall, in her article found that the pattern existed long before Columbus even visited our shores. During the Civil War and around that time frame, the Log Cabin became quite popular with American quilters. And it was slightly before that when archaeologists discovered the pattern in the most unexpected location.
Jane Hall wrote, sometime early in the 19th Century, "When the tombs in Egypt were opened, the British found thousands of small animal mummies, put there as funerary objects of respect for the departed royalty. Some of these are housed in the British Museum today and you can easily see the Log Cabin patterning in the way the strips of linen are wound around the cat or ibex."
Some items in the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland feature the Log Cabin design and are dated in the 1700s. Early farmers in and around Edinburgh cultivated their fields in a pattern much resembling the log cabin design.
New Techniques
To make the piecing even simpler, Billie Lauder came up with the faux log cabin pattern. Also, a mock log cabin pattern begins with a four-patch center. For more variations, check out quilter and designer Judy Martin’s Log Cabin Quilt Book.
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