Current Work In Progress

I should say, one of my current works in progress, as pictured on my home page, is almost complete. As mentioned previously, The quilt is The City Stitcher Quilt Collection designed by Janet Miller.  I have one more house block to make and join to the other 2 houses in the row.

                                                    This house is named the Sturdy Brick

                                     
                                                      and this house is the Apartment House

The last house block is called the Town Hall.  At the moment, I can't locate the pattern.  I recently cleaned my craft room, and put it somewhere to work on it later.  The more I organize my room, the more I can't find anything. LOL

The rows consist of 3 house blocks each.  Top row, then each side row is attached to what is referred to as the "green".  My green represents a park like setting of flowers with stone sidewalks connecting the pathways.

The birds are embroidered; I added more and different kinds of birds than what the pattern called for.  I happen to enjoy my backyard birds, and felt that my quilt needed to reflect that.  I felt the Apartment House needed a park bench, so I drew a park bench for the residents to enjoy the birds and the park:)  Sometimes you need the unexpected thing to add zing to your project!!

Oh, yes, the houses are all paper pieced.  I had never really understood this method, or thought that this is something that I could do.  But, my friend showed me and my daughter this quilt hanging in one of the quilt shops, and she wanted us to do this as a project together.  My daughter fell in love with it too, so that began our by-weekly craft night, for the next year.  Many fun road trips looking for the right house fabrics.  I think we can all say, this project has added a lot of fabric to our "stash".

Tress, appliqued.  I can't remember that I had ever done anything like this before either.  On the whole, I like doing applique, a very relaxing thing to do in the evening.  This quilt has a little bit of everything, and I think I would really like to do this again, but all in a civil war theme.  But, I don't really need two quilts basically of the same thing.  I do have the wall space in this house; it's something to consider when I get all the other things on my list done. LOL

I didn't want to end up hand quilting the whole thing at one time, so I came up with a way to hand quilt each individual block, leaving enough fabric to each side of the block to attach them in the back.  It came out pretty cool.  Had I known that my outcome would come out so good, I would have chosen to have all my quilt house block backs the same fabric.  But, since the quilt is going to be hung on the wall, it wasn't important to me to have each back match.  I was trying to be frugal, so I used the background fabric from each house to match the back of that house.

In between working on this quilt, I also had a chance to complete some smaller wall quilts and table runners last year.  This year so far, I have completed 3 doll size quilts (2 were presents for my granddaughter's), and one was for the online small (doll size) quilt challenge.  Because I joined this on line quilt club in mid-January, I just finished this quilt today.  It measures 16 inches x 22 inches.

This is a Kathleen Tracy pattern from her book, Remembering Adelia.  She has a blog. titled Sentimental Quilter, and a group you can join to complete her small quilt challenges each month.  Check her out, I found her site by accident, joined her Small Talk Quilt Group, and have had a ball ever since.  Try it, you'll like it!!!

 I'll be shopping this weekend for the February challenge quilt fabric.  I think I have some work to do to get caught up and complete in the next 2 weeks.

Ah, I wonder where I put that missing house block pattern.....................................

Sharon