Folded Log Cabin or Manx Log Cabin for National Jelly Roll Day

The other night at quilt guild one of our members was showing some antique quilts made by her grandmothers.  A folded log cabin quilt caught everyone's interest.  I will post a picture of it here once I have her permission.

I went looking for the instructions on how to make a folded log cabin block and found several that used strips of fabric folded in half, but if you lifted the folded edges you would have been able to see the stitching and this particular quilt you could not.  I finally found this wonderful tutorial by Ice Bear Quilts called a Manx Log Cabin.  It calls for jelly roll strips or 2.5" strips of fabric and the folds come out at half an inch.  Doing some math, I believe the antique quilt must have used 1.25" strips which came out at one quarter inch folds!  So if you really wanted to, you could cut your jelly roll strips in half to work in one quarter inch scale.

I won't go into all the details of how it's made as the tutorial is really good and gives the history of the block as well.  I started with foundation fabric which I ironed on the diagonal as instructed but I also drew some pencil lines every inch to help keep me square as I went along.

Here is the centre square and the first log added.  I folded the corner back so you can see that there is one inch of fabric including the one quarter inch seam allowance on the back of the fold and one and one-half inches of fabric on the front fold.  If you wanted your fabric to go further, you could probably take a shallower fold and still get the same effect.

Here are two completed rounds.

Here are three completed rounds.

Here are nine completed rounds plus a tenth row attached in the regular log cabin method.  Since the final folded log cabin row does not have another folded row on top of it you can see the full width of it.

I plan on making a pineapple quilt with this fabric and had an extra jelly roll on hand to make some cushions to go with the quilt and decided to try out this technique.  The second cushion top will sew up even more quickly since I cut the strips for it as I worked on this one.

So this was my Jelly Roll sewing for National Jelly Roll Day!