Log Cabin Out of the Box

By Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador

I came across a wonderful scrap quilt recently. It’s called Pink/Orange/Yellow Try-Angles and it was designed and made by Johnny Barfuss.

Johnny works as a Studio Educator for Handi Quilter in North Salt Lake, Utah. Johnny told me the story of Try-angles.

“It was after the holidays one year, everything was gray. Are you familiar with inversions?” he asked.

I thought I was, but I looked it up. In normal atmospheric conditions, cool air sits above warmer air. An inversion occurs when they are switched, or inverted. Dense, cold air is trapped next to the earth’s surface, below the warmer air. This means that pollution particles, like vehicle emissions, are also trapped.

Breathing polluted air can make you feel pretty lousy. And in the dead of winter, when the holidays are over and you still face months of cold and snow, it’s a recipe for what Johnny seemed to be talking about:

A case of the winter blahs.

His solution was to buy fabrics in hot pink, hot orange and bright yellow with the intention of making a Log Cabin quilt.

“I love Log Cabins but I was kind of bored with just squares, so I thought I’d try some triangles.

“I’m not very good about sewing through my stash. I’d rather sew with new fabrics. So most of them were purchased at the time—it’s what was popular then.”

He doesn’t use a design wall and he doesn’t plan the fabric placement, except for this:

“I like to make interesting blocks with things that I think look good together, and then I combine them.”

I spent some time looking at this quilt. One of the reasons it works is the variety of scale in the prints: there are small, medium and large-sized motifs as well as solids. There are only a few fabrics with multiple colors. Instead, Johnny used mostly tone-on-tones or colors with white.

I noticed that some of the center triangles are solid and some are pieced. It’s a detail that adds interest to the quilt, however subtle.

The strips are of random widths, cut from 1″ wide to a little over 2″. To bring all of the blocks to the same size, Johnny drew a triangle of the unfinished size he wanted on a cutting mat. (That’s the finished size plus 1/2″ for seam allowance.) He used the drawn triangle as a guide and trimmed the blocks to that size. Brilliant!

Johnny quilted overlapping concentric circles with Pro-Stitcher on an Infinity longarm.

And guess what else? Artwork based on this quilt was used to package Handi Quilter’s chocolate bars for this winter’s holiday gifts. Wouldn’t it be a trip to see your quilt featured in this way?!

One more note. Do you see the dark spot at the bottom of the quilt? That’s the shadow of a Handi Quilter longarm in the studio at the company’s offices. I couldn’t manage to get a shot without the shadow but under the circumstances, I thought you’d understand.

Happy Quilting!

Diane