Twenty eight pieces.
That is the whole quilt top. Two blocks, two plain squares, and nothing else. Broken Perimeters is a free half log cabin quilt pattern by Angela Walters for Robert Kaufman, it finishes at 40 1/2 inches square, and the cover calls it a pattern for the enthusiastic novice. The piece count is not us rounding down to make a point. We counted every rectangle in the cutting list.
What makes it worth your afternoon is not that it is small. Plenty of quilts are small. It is that the simplicity is built into the construction. You get twelve strips per block, every one of them cut to an exact length, and if your block drifts even slightly, the next strip refuses to fit. You never sew six rounds and discover the problem at the end.
Download the Broken Perimeters Half Log Cabin Quilt Pattern
The pattern is six pages and free, designed by Angela Walters, whose site is Quilting Is My Therapy, and published by Robert Kaufman in 2016. It features her Fragmental collection.
Download the Broken Perimeters pattern PDF
Read the rest of this page before you cut. There is an arithmetic problem in the fabric list that we checked three ways, and it will cost you two trips to the shop if you meet it with the rotary cutter already in your hand.
What Makes a Half Log Cabin Different From a Log Cabin
In a traditional block, the strips go all the way around the center square. Four sides, round after round, closed rings growing outward. In a half log cabin the center square sits in a corner and the strips are added to two sides only, the top and the left. Each round is an L instead of a frame.
That is the name. The perimeters are broken because they never close.
The layout does the rest of the work. Each block is sewn to a plain 20 1/2 inch square, and the two pairs are joined so the pieced blocks sit diagonally opposite each other. Turn the second block through half a turn as you place it and the two small center squares end up touching at the exact middle of the quilt, with the L shapes opening outward from there in opposite directions.
If you have made the log cabin version, the difference will feel strange for about four minutes and then obvious. You are doing half the work per round and the block grows in one direction, diagonally, toward the bottom right where the center sits.
It also changes what the fabrics do. A traditional block relies on light against dark, split down the diagonal, which is why so many of them read as two triangles. Broken Perimeters has no such split. Each round is one fabric, all the way around its L, and the eight fabrics are simply sequenced from small and pale at the center to large and strong at the edge. Nothing is fighting anything.
Twelve Strips, and Every One of Them Checks Your Work
Here is the sequence, and it is the reason a beginner can finish this without a single unpicking session.
The center is a 4 1/2 inch square. The first round adds a 2 1/2 by 4 1/2 rectangle to the top, then a 2 1/2 by 6 1/2 to the left. The second round adds 2 1/2 by 6 1/2 to the top, then 2 1/2 by 8 1/2 to the left. Rounds three through six move up to 3 1/2 inch strips and continue the same way, finishing with a 3 1/2 by 20 1/2 strip down the left side.
Look at what those numbers are doing. Every strip length is exactly the measurement the unit should be at that moment. The 6 1/2 inch strip in round one fits because the unit is 6 1/2 inches tall after the first seam. The 20 1/2 inch strip in round six fits because the block is 20 1/2 inches tall after eleven seams.
We worked the whole sequence through in fractions and all twelve lengths close. The block ends at 20 1/2 by 20 1/2 inches, exactly as the pattern says, with no trimming instruction anywhere.
So you have twelve checkpoints per block, and the pattern never calls them that. If the strip is longer than the edge you are sewing it to, you have taken too deep a seam somewhere behind you. If it is shorter, your seam allowance has been drifting narrow. Catch it on round two and you lose one seam. Ignore it until round six and the block will not meet the plain square it has to join.
Press every seam open. The pattern says so in its opening notes, and with twenty seven seams in a quilt this size there is no bulk to manage anywhere, so there is no reason not to. If pressing is where your blocks usually go wrong, our guide to pressing for crisper quilt blocks covers the setting and rolling that keeps a seam flat instead of folded.
Check the Yardage Before You Cut
This is the part we would want to be told.
The pattern asks for 1/8 yard of fabrics A, B, C, D, F and G, 1/4 yard of E, and 2/3 yard of H. One eighth of a yard is 4 1/2 inches of length. We ran every cut against its allowance and three of them do not fit.
Fabric G needs two strips at 3 1/2 by 17 1/2 and two at 3 1/2 by 20 1/2. That is 76 inches of 3 1/2 inch strip. From 4 1/2 inches of length you can cut exactly one 3 1/2 inch strip across the width, which gives you 40 inches. You are 36 inches short, and you need 1/4 yard.
Fabric F needs 64 inches of 3 1/2 inch strip and has the same 40 available. Short by 24 inches. Also 1/4 yard.
Fabric D needs exactly 40 inches and has exactly 40, assuming the full width the pattern assumes. Trim the selvages and you are under.
Two more worth knowing. Fabric A is two 4 1/2 inch squares cut from 4 1/2 inches of fabric, so there is nothing left over to square the cut edge with. And Fabric H is two 20 1/2 inch squares, which need 41 inches side by side, while the pattern's own notes say to assume a usable width of 40 inches. Many quilting cottons do give you 41 inches between the selvages. If yours gives you 40, the second square has nowhere to go.
What convinced us the yardage column simply slipped a row is this. Of the four fabrics cut into 3 1/2 inch strips, E is the only one listed at 1/4 yard, and E needs the least fabric of the four at 52 inches, against 64 for F and 76 for G. The extra quarter is sitting on the fabric that did not need it.
None of this makes the pattern less worth making. It makes it worth buying 1/4 yard of each of the eight. One line on the shopping list, and every one of these problems disappears at once.
Half the Top Is One Piece of Fabric
The two Fabric H squares are cut at 20 1/2 inches, on a quilt top that measures 40 1/2 inches. Four equal quarters, and two of them are plain. Half the surface of this quilt is one gray fabric with no seam crossing it anywhere.
An alternate setting that drops plain blocks between pieced ones has always existed for two reasons. It halves the piecing, and it hands the quilter a clear field to work on. The photograph on the pattern cover shows exactly what that field is worth: the two gray squares carry dense free motion quilting edge to edge, the yellow strips carry an angular design, and the small center square carries a fan. The piecing is the drawing. The plain squares are where the quilting gets to be the drawing.
Which means your thread choice decides more of this quilt than your fabric choice does. On the pieced L shapes the stitching will mostly disappear into eight competing prints. On those two gray squares it is the only thing happening. A matching thread gives you texture you see at an angle. A contrasting one gives you a second pattern laid over the first.
If you have never had this much open space to fill, it is a good place to practice, because a quilt this size fits on an ordinary domestic machine and a 20 inch square is forgiving in a way that a 20 inch border is not.
Keeping a Half Log Cabin Quilt Block Square as It Grows
The one thing the pattern does not tell you is how to stop a 20 inch block from going out of true, and it is the part quilters who teach this block spend the most time on.
Karen Brown of Just Get it Done Quilts makes this block at a much larger scale and gives the technique for it. Square your block after every round, and here is her key point: do not square to the outside edges of the block. Square to the first unit, every time, by aligning its seam with a line on your cutting mat. Then check the outer edges against that. If there is too much, trim. If you are short, align the next strip where it should be and pin.
Her reasoning is the part worth keeping. Correcting against the center means you fix the error in the round where it happened, before it compounds through the rounds that follow. Correcting against the outside edge means you square a block that is already leaning and lock the lean in.
She also notes that the block will eventually be wider than your cutting mat. Her answer is to fold it on a seam, align the fold with a horizontal line on the mat, and trim from there. And she warns against speed, in her own words, because speed can be the enemy of accuracy.
One mechanical note of our own. Twenty four of the twenty eight pieces in this quilt are long thin rectangles, and the yardage amounts force you to cut them across the width of the fabric, which is the direction that stretches. A clean cut matters more than usual here, because a wavy edge on a 20 1/2 inch strip becomes a wavy seam you cannot press out. A fresh blade and our notes on cutting fabric accurately will do more for this quilt than any amount of careful sewing afterward.
Fabric, Thread and Backing for This Half Log Cabin Quilt Pattern
Eight fabrics, one of them a cotton solid at the center and seven of them prints from Angela Walters' Fragmental collection. You do not need that collection to make it work. What the sequence needs is eight fabrics that step from quiet to loud, because the quilt reads as a widening spiral only if each round is clearly a round.
Two of our other free patterns use the same collection, if you want to see what the prints do at a different scale: Mosaic, which is a panel quilt of 43 pieces, and Fractured Fragments, which is the same designer and the same fabrics at 1260 pieces.
For the back, the pattern asks for 2 3/4 yards, which assumes 40 inch fabric and therefore assumes you will seam two panels together to reach 48 inches. You can skip that. A 40 1/2 inch quilt needs a backing of roughly 48 inches square, and 108 inch wide backing gives you that from a single length with no seam at all and a generous margin on every side. Our complete guide to quilt backing works through the margins if you want to check the numbers for yourself.
Binding is five strips at 2 1/2 inches by the width of the fabric, which is 3/8 yard.
Making the 80 1/2 Inch Version
The last page of the pattern offers one alternative, and it is the simplest kind: make the whole thing four times and join the four quilts into one. That gives you 80 1/2 inches square.
The arithmetic is the same throughout. Sixteen units of 20 1/2 inches, which is eight pieced blocks and eight plain squares, 112 pieces in total. Still fewer than most lap quilts.
Worth thinking about before you start, because the two sizes are for different things. At 40 1/2 inches square this is a wall quilt or a baby quilt. At 80 1/2 it covers a double bed. Our quilt size chart has the mattress measurements if you want to settle that question before you buy fabric rather than after.
And if you make the large one, you are making eight 20 inch half log cabin blocks in a row. By the fourth you will know the sequence without reading it, which is exactly the kind of repetition that turns a technique into a habit.
One Last Thing
I have a soft spot for patterns that know their own scale. This one does not pretend to be more than it is. Two blocks, two squares, twelve strips each, and a cover that says enthusiastic novice without the least embarrassment about it.
Buy the extra quarter yards, square to the center after every round, and give yourself an evening with the gray squares and a thread you actually like. That is the whole project.
There are more of these in our free quilt patterns, and plenty of them are bigger. This is not the one to skip because it is small.
P.S. If you cut into the Fabric G before reading the yardage section, you are not the first and the pattern is ten years old. Two 3 1/2 inch strips of anything close in tone will finish the round and nobody will ever find it.
