51. Foundation Piecing Log Cabin Blocks

It’s time to tackle another hair section for Express Your Love with more foundation piecing! For the yellow section I decided to give log cabin blocks a try again, but this time with foundation piecing.

Of course working off a block pattern presented some challenges. For one thing, a log cabin is pieced from the center to the outside edges. Of course you could just piece one block in the middle of the wides section on the hair piece and then just keep adding strips until the space is filled.

But I didn’t want to do it that way. I wanted to have several log cabins pieced along the lock of hair. Hmm…

The solution to this ended up being simple – piece the blocks first, then fill in the gaps between the blocks with more strips of yellow fabric. For the last 2 strips to seal the two blocks together, I folded over the raw edge and top stitched it down.

I couldn’t figure out a way around the top stitching, and after completing the section, I had trouble seeing exactly where those lines were. A lot of times I’ll agonize about a technique like this and get really nit picky about finding another solution. In this case, the simplest solution was also the easiest – just fold it over and stitch it down!

And if this totally doesn’t make any sense, I’m sure it will make a lot more sense with this video:

In the end, this was one of the fussier foundation piecing designs I created, but I still think the end result was worth it! The yellow fabric also created some issues by being so light everything was showing through. By folding over the strip, the show through was eliminated, but it did result in a bit more time consuming piecing.

Have fun trying out this design and share your progress on Friday!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Other Foundation Piecing Posts: 
Prepare Your Foundation 
Red Diagonal Section  
How to Create a Scrappy Mix of Colors 
Orange Triangle Section
Yellow Log Cabin Section  
Green Mosaic Section 
Blue Double Scrappy Section 
Purple Braid Section