Celebrate Labor Day by working on a quilt!!

That's what I'm going to do!  I've been working hours and hours on the Quiltmania 2012 BOM by Yoko Saito. A real sweatshop feeling but it's so addicting!  I have a few machine and hand embroidery details left on the blocks.  I may be avoiding it by sitting here at the computer ... but want to get those done before I put the beast together!

A quick review - there were 6 blocks in the Magazine series.  But I didn't like the final layout they did.  And if you're going to change something ... well, why not change everything and really make it yours!?!?!  Yep, that's how I get into so much trouble and have so many UFOs!  I wanted a square center so I designed 3 more blocks to fill in.  My next task is to add top and bottom borders.  Top being mountains and bottom being the beach and ocean.  The town will be Brookings Oregon, my hometown now.

Here are the blocks that you haven't seen yet.

This is block 3 from the magazine.  We sewed them out of order because we were a year behind anyway and wanted to save one "easy" block after the dreaded block 5 - which we called "Pile of houses"!  If you lived thru block 5, you were seriously hooked!!

Block 6 from the magazine.  6 houses, but at least they weren't in a pile!  My center background was cut too big - and it's been patch, patch, patch ever since!  So I do have an extra staircase coming down and a bird on the roof ...  I really got into the hand embroidery on some of the trees and the window panes!  Great fun in front of the tv at night!

This was my first block I designed.  It was basically taking my favorite houses from the other blocks, reversing them and guessing at what size I needed the block.  I was awake in the middle of the night this week.  You know how you lay there and think about design problems!!  Quilt or life in general!  And I thought - this town needs some pine trees!!!  I added triangular trees to 5 of the 9 blocks and am loving it even more!

We definitely needed a school. So I looked thru my house quilt pattern collection and found this schoolhouse.  Perfect!  The houses around the school are smaller because it's an older neighborhood!!  LOL!  I still need to put hand embroidery details on this quilt - window panes and the swings.  The flag was a happy design - I couldn't find the red stripe I was looking for but this worked well.

In this block, I picked houses out of the designer's book "Houses, Houses, Houses"  It's a great book!!  I had to reduce the 4 houses slightly.  P, a friend here who is also working on these blocks, mentioned something about a tree house and we just had to run with it from there!!  I remember climbing trees to get to the rickety-est trees houses in existence.  I need to add wood ladder steps up the tree.

It's coming together ... I love this portion of the design process!!