Friday, August 16, 2013

Little house on the prairie

Love circle blocks this month are pretty free-form. Natalie requested "happy houses and trees" while giving us free reign to do what we would like as long as we were bright and scrappy. She also posted some suggested house blocks to get us started, and I chose to use the suggested pattern from verykerryberry.


I blew it up a little bit to make things easier on myself and set to freezer paper piecing. I've only used freezer paper once before to make a reverse applique panel. This was quite different, and a bit more fiddly. I'm glad I tried it. I might have more respect for foundation paper piecing now. It's possible things would have gone more smoothly for me if I had trimmed around each piece with the same allowance all around, then I could have lined up fabric edges instead of feeling my way through the fabric for the pieces of paper. Lesson learned.


I did end up with quite a cute house in the end. Some cupcake-loving couple lives here, apparently. That might be me and Dave. Though he would never go for a pink roof. You can see some of my points aren't exact (cough chimney cough) but for a first time with this technique I'm pretty happy. If there is anything I've learned after making a few large quilts, it's that the small mistakes disappear in the final product. 


After trimming up my little house I needed to set it in a larger block, Natalie didn't ask for a particular size or shape but requested the blocks be close in area to a 12.5" square or larger. I decided to improvise myself a bit of a scene. It was straightforward to sew some green and blue together to fit the sides of the house and I set it just off center because I liked it better that way. Add some blue sky to the top and green grass to the bottom and voila! An approximately 12.5" square quilt block.

I like the space in this block -- it made me think of the houses near the barn back home, set it in huge lots of grass, grass, and more grass. Plus, there's that oh so cute cupcake waiting to be eaten.


Linking to Finish it up Friday

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