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Friday, September 3, 2010

Little House Quilt - Let's Build The House! #5




By now you should have worked through tutorials 1 through 4, you have two copies of your pattern, one trimmed to the house and numbered and the other one intact and numbered, you have created a base lot and sky to place your house on and have a pretty good idea where you want to place it.  You have gathered up the materials for your house and have some type of fusible bond to work with.  Remember, if you want to stitch on your piece and not gum up your sewing machine needle, you may want to consider a fusible like "Mistyfuse" or a very light weight heat and bond, if you want to do your detail work with a marking pen and not a sewing machine, you can use a medium to heavy weight heat and bond.
First thing to do is separate the body of your house pattern from the roof.  Simply cut it apart.
Now you have some decisions to make.  You can cut the individual pieces of the roof and sides of the house into your numbered segments and place them individually, or you can leave them intact, which I am going to do for this quilt and create your definition with stitching, embellishment or you may elect to piece certain portions and not others to achieve your end look.
REMEMBER, right now we are only dealing with the body of the house and the roof, details of windows, doors, stairs...etc. will all come later in the process.
DON'T WORRY if you have a little strip of siding up in the roof area like I do; the area where the roof gables are at different heights.  I will cut a little strip of my "siding" and fuse that over the top portion to fill in that space.  For right now, you just want to separate the roof area from the house.
Having selected your fabrics for both you are ready to apply the bonding agent (misty fuse or what ever you have elected to use) and cut out your roof and your house.  TIP:  When you cut your house, give yourself a little extra allowance on the area where the roof and the house will meet so that you can overlap the roof slightly.  Doesn't have to be much, an 8th of an inch is plenty.
Place your "house" pattern on top of your fusible backed fabric and trace around the outline with a disappearing ink pen, very light pencil or chalk.  Cut out your house and set that piece aside.  You will do the same for the roof and set them both aside...NOTE:  VERY IMPORTANT!  YOU WILL NOT BE FUSING THEM TO THE BACKGROUND AT THIS TIME.


do the same for the roof...

TIP:  If you have little pieces to cut out, or narrow bits...just put scotch tap right over the top of the pattern onto your fabric, trace on the tape and leave it in place until you are finished cutting your piece, then remove the tape.
Here is the basic house...REMEMBER do not fuse this to your background yet!

Okay now, remember I told you my Little House has some siding up in the roof area and the gables meet at angles.  This is how I deal with that...Originally I numbered my roof pieces, I know that piece #6 on my roof pattern is a piece of siding.  I cut apart the roof pattern and select that little piece #6, place that on my house fabric and trace around it, cut it out and again, using my roof pattern pieces, I line up the area where that siding piece #6 is going to go and fuse it into place.  Example below:

Now you can see in the picture below, we have added a little bit of definition, you can see the siding area on the roof.  I will add more definition in the final stages of the quilt with machine stitching to show the actual roof lines, so we won't worry about that now.  For this segment of the project, we just need to have our roof and sides assembled.
REMEMBER:  you are not fusing this to the background at this time.  TIP:  Save your left over bits of fused fabric, you may need them later in the project to add definition to an area.

Alright now!  Things are starting to take shape.  Your next task is to look through your stash and assemble fabrics that will serve as trees, flowers, rocks, walls, fences, ponds, driveways, paths, what ever you want in YOUR landscape for your Little House Quilt.   Look at the example quilt in the photos section and you will see that I used fabrics that would do the work for me.  The pine tree fabric offers the swirls that you might imagine as branches, I simply cut out cone shapes... the trees with the birds...well that was just too easy,  some fluffy circles a little thread embellishment and I was done!  This is the time to let your imagination run wild!  It doesn't have to look just like your photo...you can get rid of your neighbors, put your animals in the yard, your family, your car, your boat, wildlife, you can do ANYTHING you wish!
Let's meet back here shortly to start  Landscaping our Little House!

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