How I built a house- a minitutorial Part I or

The finished house block 28" square
...now for the thread painting!!

If you can trace you can make one of these house blocks of any house you chose!

The Birthday quilt saga continues!! I have been working on the center of Connie's birthday quilt. It will be a 28" square finished center medallion surrounded by blocks her friends made for her fiftieth birthday.

THE PICTURE
BYTW you can take artistic license...
this was a winter picture...trees were bare....
so alot came from our imagination and we all agreed to chop down that big pine!!

I started with a picture of her house. Sometime that afternoon I got the brilliant idea that it was easier to blow it up into a poster and trace it than it would be to have draw all that two point perspective correctly.

So I posterized it in Picasa, a free photo editing program from Google. I printed it out and took it to our quilt miniretreat along with several bags of fabric. At retreat Margaret Wesley joined me and we taped the picture together...

The poster


Just part of the fabric heap..there are two more HUGE bags already back in the sewing room

The Pattern

The other Margaret and I taped it to the window and traced it...BIG mistake...we should have traced it on tracing paper. So much easier to see through than the roll of white paper from Sams!


Once the pattern was made, Connie and I chose the background fabrics and she sewed them together...a hand dyed sky and a lovely sunflower green batik for the ground. Next came the colors of the house - a shibori grey and khaki for the khaki top of the house...we thought it would look like shadows on the khaki top and a green striped batik for the bottom.

To make the house it was traced onto fusible from the pattern. I don't know about you but I always have to think long and hard about which way to trace it. So annoying to get the fused pieces backwards. I would rather glue them down with Roxanne's glue baste it.

The house fused onto the background!

So 8 hours later with the help of Margaret and some help from Sue cutting and fusing...this is what it looked like by Saturday afternoon...building a house takes time!:>

I DO wish I had NOT fused it when I was tired because if you put a grid on the house some of the fused pieces TWITCHED out of alignment. VERY annoying...if they were glued I could pull them up and place them more precisely which is important when it comes to perspective!

Margaret W took off with it to ink in the "rafters" along the roof lines and paint the red stripe across the front of the eaves and the porch. The other stripe on the right is fused. She also inked the porch. I think it took her most of Sunday Monday and Tuesday to do it. She also made a new pattern on vellum so she could see better...then she started adding the background trees.

Thursday and Friday she came over to my house and we started working on the rest of the trees, the yard, the people and the cat.


To make the cat, Margaret W traced one of my sketches of my cat Tom, tracing and coloring him on a piece of white fused fabric.

And this is what she came up with...Connie's seal point siamese!!
Once again tracing was easier than having to start from scratch!

She peopled the porches with Connie's family while I landscaped the yard.

This is what it actually looked like...it has to be squared up at some point!
I thought you might like to see that it is NOT square or neat on the edges! We will leave it to the queen of squaring up to do that....Ille Waters!!

About 9pm Thursday nite I decided one of the porch columns was leaning...the third from left...and i ripped it loose...much happier with the new STRAIGHTER column...Roxanne's glue baste it would have made the rearranging the schlonchindicular house parts SO MUCH easier...bytw that's Charleston for crooked!

As far as we got on Thursday....

ABOUT 60 hours later

We spent 8 more hours on Friday finishing the foreground trees and the yard...wondering how long I spent cutting out fern fronds and flowers??! We also cut MANY more leaves for the foreground trees...I really think they gave depth to the project. Now for the thread painting!!
...now for the thread painting!!
Thank goodness Margaret W wants to work on that too!!


A CHALLENGE!!


Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art or Ware's Folly - the original name
built in 1812

BYTW we are having a challenge...Margaret and I who have TWO widely divergent styles are both going to do one of the old buildings in downtown Augusta...I am thinking the Gertrude Herbert so perhaps we can approach the Art Museum Director to do a show with our creations. AND YES you too can play if you want!! I think it would be great fun...either Margaret or I will go downtown and take a pic to share after we decide on the building. Or maybe a better idea would be to let each person do their own landmark?? Call me Willow I am flexible and open to your ideas!