`It's Been a While Since My Last Post!

It's been a tough month to say the least.  We had a bit of a health crisis in the family which caused us to leave our beach house in a hurry.  Things are returning to normal but I didn't have much time for doing much sewing, dyeing or bird watching!

I am very  much trying to get rid of a lot of fabric including batiks, hand dyes and just normal fabric and hopefully I will be able to sell a bunch of that in our June garage sale at quilt club.  The challenge is getting it out to the car!!  I am continuing to destash as much as I can.  I was hoping to make the move south permanently but doesn't look like that is in the cards for now but want to get rid of as much as possible to enable that!

I have been making quilt blocks for "Habitat for Humanity" quilts which Quilters by the Sea supports in the Wilmington NC area.  I have enough houses now for three quilts and am diligently working on some trees.  I generally have 15 houses per quilt and they end up measuring about 40 x 50 which is a nice size.  I adapted the pattern from one that was posted on the Missouri Quilts site.  They had added some triangles around the ouside.

You can see here the two different tree sizes I put into these quilts.  The trick is to add the same number of bigger and smaller trees to each row.

 To make thsse 7 1/2 blocks (finished which uses 2 inch strips), you need the following:  Using 2 1/2 inch strips would result in a 10 in house but you would need to adjust all the sizes below.  I may do this at some point!

5 2 1/2 inch squares in blue for the sky

2 2 1/2 inch squares in red for the chimney

1 8 in strip incn brown for the roof

1 8 in strip inch in any color you want to use for the house

3 2 x 3 1/2  inch strips in the house color

1 2 in square for above the window in house color

1 2 x 3 1/2 inch strip in brown for the door

1 2 x 2 inch square in yellow or some light color for the window

The trees are done by sewing 4 2 inch strips together and then using either a 45 degree angle ruler for the larger trees or a 60 degree angle tool for the smaller trees.  I use these two rulers to also cut the sky background.  The trunk is another 2 inch square piece in brown.  I then cut 2 inch strips to fill in the sky  next to the trunk.  For the larger trees, I cut these 3 1/2 inch long and for the smaller trees, 3 inches long and then I trim.  

To finish them up I sew trees randomly between the houses making sure I always have two small and one big in each row and then I use green 2 inch strips for the sashing between the rows.  To make it longer, you could use strips of blue on the top if you want to.  I use all sorts of random scraps of the greens, browns and light blues.