Little Houses

Once again, I’m all behind with my blog, but I have been busy – my finger seems to be better, after two whole weeks with no knitting at all (that was hard!) so I’ve started knitting again a bit, but I took the opportunity to do some sewing whilst I couldn’t knit, and now I can’t seem to stop making quilts…

This was the jelly roll which first started me on the slippery slope of quilting – I saw it and a Monkey Buttons pattern, and just couldn’t resist having a go.

 

The pattern’s called The House That Jack Built, and consists of three different house blocks. I decided to do all the roofs in red and green, and mix up the colours for the houses. But at that point I hadn’t leant the tricks to make piecing quicker, and it took me ages to do six blocks, at which point I put it all in a bag and left it there.

I also wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the quilt once I’d done it, but last weekend I remembered about it and decided to just crack on with it regardless. It only took me a couple of evenings to do the rest of the houses, and I laid them out to make sure I’d got a reasonable mix of colours, before thinking about what to use for the sashing and borders. But the more I looked at the houses laid out on the floor, the more I liked them like that, and the panel was the perfect size for a wall-hanging on my stairs, so I just sewed them together as they were.

Because it was for the wall, I didn’t do much in the way of quilting, just four horizontal stitch-in-the-ditch lines between the rows of houses. I used calico for the backing and the binding – it’s a very narrow binding, just 1/4”, as otherwise I’d have cut off the corners of the roofs.

To hang it I stitched half square triangles into the corners when I sewed the binding on, and a loop in the middle – that’s just held down with a safety pin, it seemed easier than sewing it into place. I’ve just used a garden cane and a couple of nails to hang it.

And this is how it looks in place -

And the view from the front door – I’m really pleased with the way it fills the space there.

The houses remind me of those seaside towns you get on the Yorkshire coast, where all the houses seem to be on top of each other.

Like these houses in Whitby.

I see the quilt every time I go up or downstairs, and it makes me smile. That’s a result, I think.