colourful houses

I will never, ever be one of those people who have a cool, minimalistic home with white grey walls, furniture and floors.  Nope, I have a colour fetish - the more the merrier.  And the pleasure is not just to be found in fabric - admiring the well chosen colours of the clothes of strangers in the corner store, looking out for the line of gerberas in an old neighbour’s front garden, or putting rich pumpkins with glowing capsicums and verdant green rosemary in a black cast iron pan is just as satisfying and makes me daydream of quilts in these colours.  

 And there was plenty of colour in Bootville this evening.  Julian subdued the three foot long rhubarb that had been lurking on the bench …

… into crumble of course …

- and I stitched up a version of a Thimbleberries quilt advertising a new line of fabric in the latest Fons and Porter to grace our newsagents.   I, however, used scraps from Beth’s Sampler and some of my reproduction stash.  Boy have those fat quarters from the sampler gone a long way - one 24 block sampler, one dresden plate wall hanging and now a 22 by 18 inch wall hanging.  Cool!

I just love the rich colours of this little quilt - I especially love the small dashes of black (Patti, I am completely converted to the beauty of black) and the houses look like a row of terrace houses perched on the hill of an old, old suburb where I would love to live.  

The border looks like a Mondrian painting - or some very stylised Art Deco stained glass. Nevertheless, I don’t want the original border but haven’t yet decided on my own.  I’m going to sleep on it.  

Clearly, or unclearly as the case may be, I need to buy some better pencils than those currently floating about - for some reason, one of us bought 2H pencils - why, I don’t know.  They may sharpen to glorious points but can you see that line?  Where?  There!  From point to point.  No, I can’t either.

And knowing I only had a 2H made me lazy so instead of drafting the little houses on my graph paper, I just guessed - yeah that looks like 4 inches!  Well it was only going swimmingly until I went to stitch the first two columns together.  

Little A suggested just trimming off the first column so that they were the same.  For a fleeting second this seemed like a champion of an idea.  But then I remembered I was working hard at accuracy here, so, get this!  I measured the first column and worked out how much bigger I needed to make the second! Amazing!

The third column was a doddle and I want to make this little quilt again and again and again - I’m thinking 1930s houses, polka dot houses, bright houses (Park Slope style) and pale, pale blues and greys and ecrus to make me think of the beach. 

Hey look, the bottoms match!

And check out Little A - she’s beavering away at her Moomin stories the minute she gets home from school!

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