Village Quilt Along Update

Hello and happy Thursday! Earlier this year I decided to join in on the quilt-a-long for the Village pattern of adorable houses by Carrie Nelson. I already had the pattern and decided that it would be a lot of fun to combine all of our fabric collections for the house blocks for a fun quilt.  I immediately made 16 blocks and was hooked (eight of them were made with fabrics I can’t share just yet, though)! I’ve been busy with other things but decided I needed to make some more houses ASAP!  They really are so much fun!

The houses above were made one at a time, but now I’m using a more 

streamlined method that I thought I’d share with you.  This is a technique I often use when I want to make a lot of similar blocks quickly.

 First, I list on a scrap piece of paper the different pieces I need to cut out for the block.  Then I write the measurements of those pieces on the paper.  This makes it so I don’t have to keep referring back to the pattern while I cut. It really does save  a lot of time when making multiples of one block.

My next step was to choose a variety of prints for the houses.  I decided I’d make a group of eight.  I was able to stack these pieces in groups of four and cut multiples at a time.

 I set the house sides and top pieces out and then selected doors from scraps left over from previous sewing. Then I chain pieced doors to door tops and then chain pieced adding the house sides.  The eight lower units were finished quickly.

If you look carefully, you’ll see I used three different backgrounds for the roof sections and that there are just four different print fabrics used for the roofs.

 I decided to use my Fit to be Geese ruler for the roof sections–flying geese units are made over-sized and then trimmed perfectly to size.  Since this method yields four at a time, I used eight of the blocks I made and have eight roof units left over for future blocks.  This will make the next set of houses sew together even more quickly! (See my post on flying geese blocks here).


I also cut extra door units from the house fabrics for this set of blocks.  These will go into a baggie that I’ll label so I know what they are for.  So basically, for my next group of eight houses I’ll simply need to choose eight different fabrics not represented in this group for the house walls and top pieces.

 All of our previous fabric groups are represented by at least one fabric in this group of houses!

I am really having a lot of fun with these.  I might have to finish up eight more before I put this away and go back to some other projects I need to be working on. I also need to mark off these blocks on my check off sheet that I posted about when I originally posted about these blocks here.

And…if you need to make this quilt too…you can find the pattern back in stock here.

Happy quilting…and thanks so much for stopping by!