Houses with Stripes and Florals

I saw a Kaffe Fassett quilt in the Glorious Patchwork book (1997) that inspired me to make my own version of houses. His is composed of strip pieced bottoms and various triangles for the roofs. I like to get my fabric to do as much work as possible, so I pulled out several of his striped fabrics and this is what I got.

First, I had to determine what size I wanted my houses. I didn't want them 5" x 10" as are in the book. And I composed the roofs in a very different manner. I settled on a 6" x 9" house/roof/sky combo. My roofs are simply Flying Geese units. I cut 7-1/4" squares of "roof" fabric into 4 equal sized triangles, so I had 4 roofs per print.

Flying Geese units for roofs

You can also see some of the main house striped fabrics. I cut these 6-1/2" x 6-1/2".

6-1/2" squares of a variety of stripes

But, looking at the fabric I selected for sky fabric left me less than enthusiastic.

Several house blocks sewn with blah sky fabric.

I made 2 dozen blocks and I still didn't like them. So, do you know what I did? Yes, I did! I took them apart! And found some bluer sky fabric and started all over again. Sometimes you just have to do things like that. Do you think I would have liked them better if I had sewn all 65 of them?!!

The ones below use the same roof fabric because I'm going to use them either in the very center of my quilt or on the outside in some way. Yes, I typically operate without a full plan.

I have between 18 and 24 of these with matching roofs

And here are 11 different prints for the roofs. This gives me a total of at least 65 blocks.

11 different prints for the roofs. I have 4 each of these matching pairs

Once I get the Sharks Teeth units off my design board, I will put these up and play with their placement. Oh, you never saw these blocks? These are paper pieced for 10" finished blocks. I have finished sewing the four corner blocks but still have the paper on. But take a look:

10" Shark's Teeth blocks

This is a pattern I have on Craftsy. See the link on the right. The pattern comes in 3", 4", 5", 6" and 10" sizes.

Now, when you paper piece, you can accumulate quite a bit of scraps. Can I show you some of my KF scraps?

Just some of my Kaffe Fassett scraps!

 Thanks for stopping by. I'll keep you posted on my development of these two quilts.