Speaking of houses

A few weeks back I went to our guild retreat where the theme was "It Takes a Village". You might recall seeing the Happy Scrappy Houses blocks I made and wrote about on October 15.

After the retreat it occurred to me that this block pattern would make a cheerful and fun quilt to give to a guild member who is recovering from serious surgery. I put the word out and asked members to make a block for this purpose. When the blocks came back it seemed like a good idea to make two quilts; one small one for the wall and a larger one in a lap quilt size.

Once the blocks were collected two guild friends came over to my house and we spent a day putting together the tops. This was a speedy project - we got the tops done, then quilted and bound. If Hurricane Sandy had not intervened we would have been finished even sooner.

Here we see "A Pieceful Cul-de-Sac".  We wanted to make this fun and remind the recipient of the many hours she has spent volunteering in a local elementary school so figures from the Lorax (of Dr Seuss fame) along with a pumpkin (It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown - we did this on Halloween) appear in this quilt.

 And here we have "The Missingu Village" . Please excuse the uneven light across the image - I'm a better quilt maker than photographer.

Since most everything I make now takes months, if not years, to complete it was fun to make a couple of quilts that were completed in under a month.

And as for schoolhouses I did make a Little Red Schoolhouse quilt way back in 1980something...

I see this was made using a similar pattern to this past Saturday's block 11; there are subtle differences however like the chimneys, that band of white above the windows and the small step below the door. My goodness, I even handquilted it! You can read more about this quilt on my post dated March 7, 2011. And looking at it I think I prefer this pattern to the one I came up with for block 11.


Have you "built" any houses lately?