Building a Quilt Neighborhood

It was a cold and windy day and my day off work so what’s a girl to do?  Clean or sew?  Well, of course I sewed!  I made 2 more churches and 2 schools for my Around the Block quilt I only have 2 houses and 10 fences left to make then I can put them all together and sew them around the quilt I pieced a few months ago.  This has been a fun project!  The kind you almost don’t want to see end.  I learned a lot from this pattern on the construction of a house block and now I have a project in my head to make a wall hanging of my own house.  I drew it on paper and now I need to put it on EQ so that I can get the measurements right and get to work.  That won’t be for a while though because when I finished playing all day with my fabrics I went through the stack of finished quilt tops I have and matched them up with their backs and battings and realized that I have everything to finish 3 quilts and maybe even 4.  I had been putting off doing the quilting on these because I wasn’t confident in my quilting skills, but I have been doing a lot of practicing and I think the time has come to tackle them one by one.  The hardest part now is to lay them out, sandwich them and baste them.  I usually use a light coat of spray baste then pin and recently I started using wash away thread and basting from top to bottom, side to side, and corner to corner.  Sounds like I am a little paranoid, but it works really well!

I have been watching enviously the group that has committed to making a house a day for the whole year.  These are not quite like my houses, the finished blocks are only 3 inches and that is tiny for so much detail.  So I found a paper piecing pattern and set out to make just one.  The paper made it so much easier, but it took me almost as long as it did to make those 2 school houses you see up there.  I might get faster with time, but for now I am glad that I gave it a try and didn’t write it off as something I just can’t do.  I had intended to use the red for the front of the house but, I got a little forgetful and now my window doesn’t show because it blends in.  I can see that is important to keep contrast so that all your hard work shows.  I think I will put a border on it and I could use it for a coaster in my sewing area!

I like to follow a Yahoo group called Small Quilt Talk.  The group is led by author Kathleen Tracy who has written several books on making small quilts.  She chooses projects each month for the group to do as a challenge and they really have fun with them.  I keep meaning to join in and do some challenges, but have yet to have found the time.  The March challenge is a little quilt with baskets and the handles are appliqué which I always seem to find challenging somehow.  I decided that the handle would be simple enough and I should give it a try.  It was pretty simple and I really enjoyed the hand sewing.  Who knows maybe next I will just hand quilt one of those quilts on my pile.

 

After a day of staying in I got to spend a day out in the yard and look what I found…read more about it on my other blog Growing Thymes.

Thanks for visiting!

Ferne