Log Beauties: 2026 Sew-Along Part 1

Just because I still haven’t finished the 2025 Patchwork Gilde Deutschland Sew-Along doesn’t mean I can’t start the next one!

The theme Log Beauties reflects a mixture of Log Cabin and New York Beauty elements. Forget everything you know about US history if you want that to make sense…but it’s a striking design, and each block was meticulously designed to use a confusing new technique. Instead of buying 30cm each of hundred different solids to create these sixteen 12″ blocks (as shown here), I decided to buy only the white and use reds and a blue from my stash. This year’s Sew-Along doubles as my Semiquincentennial Quilt. Work smarter, not longer.

This is a massively frustrating exercise pairing precision-piecing, which I stopped doing years ago for obvious reasons, with puzzling out German patchwork jargon. If anyone knows why I am doing this, please let me know.

At least it’s in inches this year, so I can use my real rulers!

Light Dots

The first of the sixteen blocks combines foundation paper piecing (FPP) with normal piecing. It wasn’t too hard. There will be some applique; I am going to do all of that after the end because I hate re-threading the machine.

Lady Liberty

This one took much longer, but due to the foundation paper-piece technique, most of the points look good.

Ups & Downs

This one gets all its visual interest from applique, which I will get to later.

Skyline Radiance

The pieces of this one were cut out with templates that barely fit on an A4 sheet of paper, and most of the seams had to be re-sewn at least once. The outer strips are intentionally bigger than 12.5″ so they can be trimmed to size later.

Flying Formation

This one nearly broke me. Using 87 pieces in a single 12″ block is excessive, and due to the nature of FPP only two seams could be sewn in each step, which lead to dozens of leaders-and-and-enders laying around all over the place. Incredibly annoying.

Beauty in Pink

The white-and-red square is actually a print with scenes of London. At this point, I’ve seen Turn: Washington’s Spies on Netflix and read a bunch of American Heritage essays about the Revolution and I’m feeling punchy–why not put a reminder of the lobster-backed bastards into my quilt?

The triangles are all FPP’d.

Light Lines

No templates or papers for this one, just plain strip piecing. It was almost too easy–only had to rip out a couple of seams. *suspicious ears*

Stegosaurus

After a pause to make things for Switzerland, go to Switzerland, recover from Switzerland, make things for the US, go to the US, and recover from the US, I’m back on the next tranche of blocks (when did we all learn that word?) for the Sew-Along.

“Isn’t this the same as the first one?” Sort of; the points are cut off and the applique I haven’t done yet is smaller.

The blue stripe is bigger than the blue stripe on all the other blocks, and I checked and re-checked the instructions about a dozen times to make sure I wasn’t cutting it too large. The finished block is 12.5″ (ish), so it must be OK, but it bothers me.

Zebra

“Simple” strip-piecing with a complicated set of “and then un-sew and re-sew in a different place” instructions–I had to redo each of the last four steps three times before I finally got all the white squares where they were supposed to be. But it’s done.

This is the first of the blocks with new red fabric bought intentionally for this project.

Hedgehog

This is obviously Beauty in Pink with cut-off points and the colors reversed, but it looks good, and the FPP made it easy.

I am running out of scraps for leaders-and-enders.

If I acknowledge the lack of applique, I’d say I’m about halfway through finishing all the blocks and shoving them in a box to become a UFO. 😉