Designing My House Quilt

Okay let me start this off by saying I am not a quilter. I currently do not have any desire to make quilts. Mostly because I like to make useful things (even if they're just decoration, like my turtle or pumpkins). Quilts are very time consuming (I'm told it takes an experienced quilter about 40 hours to make 1 non-complicated quilt) and once you have a couple displayed and some on the beds, I'm not sure what you do with them. I suppose you could sell some but they seem rather hard to sell. Plus, I'm not really interested in selling my stuff either, especially when it takes 40 hours to make.

David's mom is a quilter. I have recently gotten her into more sewing things since we started doing our Sunday projects but her passion is still quilts. She has given quilts away, she has sold quilts, she has quilts displayed in her house, she has quilts on the beds, and then she still has totes in storage because she just has that many. I could never be like that.

However, when we were starting to clean out her sewing room (a few weeks ago, we rearranged and had to go through everything before it went back in the room. I got a bunch of scraps and some useful pieces of fabric she didn't want anymore), she gave me a 10 quilt blocks that all have houses on them. She didn't really like them and couldn't see herself making anything with them but she had won them and didn't want to just throw them out. I thought they were really cool and I thought it would actually make a pretty cool "Welcome Home" quilt to hang up in the foyer.

I took them home and didn't look at them for several weeks. Then yesterday, I decided that if I actually wanted to make this, I better get started soon since I don't think I'll have much time once Teeny gets here (this pretty much motivates me to work on any of my projects). So the first step was determining what I wanted the quilt to look like. I learned about sashing, cornerstones, borders, and all that good stuff from David's mom. She has a (very expensive) computer program that helps you design a quilt. After playing around with it for about 2 hours, I finally found something I like. The houses on it aren't my actual houses but similar styles and the coloring is just random (because mine will be too) but below the picture, I'll explain.

With the way this is designed, I need to make two houses of my own to make it work but this was the best solution. I like the inverted square colors on the two borders. The cornerstones in the inside (all the little squares) are going to be the same color to help tie the quilt together. The sashing (lines between the little squares) are going to be a mix of different colors and prints (what can I say? I like color). Then the black square is going to be a plain colored square (most likely) with a saying on it, such as welcome home or home sweet home or something like that with iron on interfaced letters in different colors. The final quilt is 72 x 72 so it's huge and will probably take up most of the wall but if I went any smaller, then I had to get rid of houses (out of the original 10) and I couldn't bear to part with any of them. Plus, I'm not really interested in a smaller quilt. There was the option of doing a 52 x 52 but I didn't like the way it turned out. Plus, on the big quilt, the black space is 26 x 26. That gives me a lot of different opportunities. On the 52 x 52, the space was only 12 x 12 and that doesn't give me a lot of room to play around.

I'll be sure to let you all know as I progress on it how it's coming along but for now, the first thing I need to do is make two more houses.