Hello Everyone,
Thank you to Liza for posting the preview of the Village Quilt, I'm sorry I haven't posted anything for a while, not sure where time went these last few months.
Many years ago, I found a photograph of an old quilt with houses and trees and the borders were festooned with swags and bows, I love that quilt. Now, after many many years, I decided to design a quilt with lots of houses and trees. Some of those trees look like flowers but they are meant to be trees, it's just that I can't draw that well. Tree pictures are usually full of detailed leaves and that is a bit of a hard thing to applique, so, my tree shapes are confined to more of an outline.
I thought I'd do a housing estate with trees and surround it with a fence of hexagon florets ( they are 3/4" hexagon sides) then this is further enclosed by a stone fencing to keep the wild things outside the fence, hence the village.
The Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics are great for this quilt, you can fussy cut interesting bits of the fabric for parts of the block. The rest of the block are easily cut using the rotary cutter. In the pattern pack there is a chart showing what strips to cut and how many pieces. Basically, for each block you'll need to choose the fabric for the roof, the roof front and contrast fabric for the windows and doors, I've kept the chimney and background constant. First, choose the fabric for the background and keep this on hand when selecting the other fabrics, mine is the Apple in the Spots fabric line. Next, I'd choose the fabric for the roof as it is the biggest piece and it would be good if you can isolate the most interesting part of the fabric and fussy cut. The same for the roof front. Many of my houses have the roof front and the large rectangle separating the lower parts of the house cut from the same fabric. Put your chosen fabrics on top of your background and see if they work.
I have hand pieced my blocks, only because my machine sewing skill is not that great.
If you would like to do some handpiecing, I'll be doing a tutorial on this in the next couple of days.
The original border was supposed to be four long ones, then I did a massive blooper in cutting. I looked at my lay out diagram and saw the previous border and then I forgot to add the corner mitred sections!! so the cut borders were mighty short. Memo to me: one must not talk on the mobile phone when cutting major pieces of fabric. I went back to the drawing board and re did the drawings, now it has 24 blocks with rather odd dimension. Actually, now, I prefer this configuration and I think it worked better as a whole, plus that now the quilt is totally portable during construction. To separate the rectangular blocks, I did strips of 1/2" hexagons in scrap fabrics with the middle hexagons done in the KF Collective Kim ombre stripes, I think it looks quite effective. If you can't be bothered to do these little hexagons, you might want to use 1" finished size strips in different fabrics. These hexagon strips were appliqued on after the rectangles have been joined together.
A week or so ago, my daughter set up a Pinterest account for me and she has placed a few boards showing photographs of this quilt and others with close ups of the fabrics. I'm still very new to the Pinterst and I don't really know how it works. This is the address on Pinterest : https://www.pinterest.com/km0089/
Here are some close ups:
Will post the handpiecing tutorials soon, Cheers, K
