In my quest to get comfortable making house blocks earlier this year, I sought out patterns, preferably free (at least at first), that I could make to sort of get my feet wet. I hadn’t really made many at all and wanted to get a feel for them. Obviously once you make a few of them, it helps you get the idea behind them and you can begin to expand your comfort zone.

At least that is how it works for me.

I found this free pattern by Heidi Pridemore and Windham Fabrics. The FREE download is here. Her version is a bit darker than the one I made - as I was trying to for a bright and cheery look. Obviously she was using it with a certain line of fabric while I wasn’t.

I actually sort of struggled with which fabric to use in the corner squares as I was going for a countryside look. After considering and discarding at least 3 or 4, I decided on this one.

I did enjoy making my houses individually different - so that hopefully no two were identical. I suppose I’m not a good planned community member, huh?

To me the center house is a bit plain. I didn’t know how to make it fancier at the time, so I just left it. However, in later quilts of mine, I did experiment at least a little with dressing a house up a bit.

Here are a few more closeups of the houses on the bottom of the quilt. Yes, they are upside down as you look it with the big house in the center right side up. However, this pattern is obviously meant to be able to looked at from various angles and to provide interest.

Here’s another closeup.

And yes, doing this pattern forced me to do some applique (the trees). And no, it didn’t kill me. Applique hasn’t been my forte, but it does provide pizzazz sometimes that piecing can’t.

Overall, while I can’t say this one particularly makes my heart go pitter patter super fast when I look at it, I do like it - I guess it just sorta beats faster. Weird, huh?

I like the fact that I forced myself to make something different from my normal scrappy blocks, plus the tiny bit of applique on here. I like the scene at least okay, and I like the fact that it is one of my now finished house quilts!

Let’s see. My repertoire has grown. So far I’ve made several completed house quilts. Let’s review.

My first one ever was probably Warm Fuzzies (my own design), and then I expanded a bit from there. I’ll show them in a gallery.