Halloween Houses

I'd assembled two house blocks and two tree blocks a couple weeks ago and blogged about them in my post for 10/11/17. Now it was time to join them and FMQ the resulting wall hanging. The blue swirl fabric for the night sky begged to be quilted in swirls. I am terrible with swirls so this was an opportunity on a small scale to practice them and get better. I doodled them and saved the marked plastic as a visual reminder of my goal. I chose a light blue thread and I did OK.

The green I'd chosen for the lawn area in front of the houses was not wide enough and so had to be pieced. To hide the piecing I'd originally wanted to make diagonal paths from the doorways of the houses as brown inserts. A simple task of inserts at 45°... and did it wrong four times! Aargh. Once I got it right I decided I did not like the way it looked anyway and preferred just piecing the green. Well by this point, after my flubs and extra cutting, piecing that green was my only remaining option. I joined it on the diagonal like for a sashing so it would be less conspicuous, and then decided to further camouflage it by quilting diagonal parallel lines in the lawn area. I used a rule which was time consuming but gave me practice and the results looked crisp. My swirls in the sky looked OK after all my fretting and my trees were acceptable with a simple 1/4" away echo even though I did not use a ruler for them. The pale grey/blue thread blended in.

For the houses however, I was lazy and in a hurry and did not use a ruler. They came out terrible! You know how as you start something and don't like it, but somehow stubbornly stupidly think if you do more, it will get better? It doesn't. I intend to in the future remove the house stitching, do it again with a ruler and possibly in a different color thread that does not contrast so much. The area of the wallhanging is small enough that perhaps I will use my domestic instead of my mid-arm to echo stitch the doors and windows. For now I chose to leave the ghastly stitching in place, forge ahead, and finish the wallhanging. This was to be a small project, not intended to consume a lot of time and most certainly not to become a UFO. I machine, rather than hand, stitched the binding on and to my surprise it came out quite reasonably well.

This is the fabric I chose for the backing. The words pumpkins appears to be upside but I made the majority of the scarecrows right side up. Doing both was not possible and since the scarecrows appeared most dominant, I gave them priority.

Here is the completed wallhanging in a state acceptable for viewing from a galloping horse from a great distance. It measures 28" by 16".

An activity for me, while watching TV, will be to pick out the ugly crooked stitches in the houses. I will add an update to this post once I have improved those houses. Consider it a home renovation project. For now I will be linking up to Sew Fresh Quilts's Let's Bee Social #199.

UPDATE 10/23/17:
What I thought would be a little picking away at stitches while watching TV turned out to be over two, almost three, hours of intense surgery deploying tweezers, seam ripper, and curved pointed scissors, sitting at the kitchen table with extra lighting and a soft cushion under my tush for the duration. My failed FMQ attempts have a way of making my stitches so tiny and often on top of themselves that their removal is a challenge.

I resigned myself to the task but made a new playlist on iTunes and set the volume pretty high on my computer about ten feet away. With no TV plot and old favorite songs of mine playing, I plucked away, one stinkin' stitch by one stinkin' stitch. The diversion worked. Thankfully I was able to lose track of time instead of losing track of the plot of some show. Here are my houses, stitch-free and steamed as best I could to camouflage the crooked trail of needle holes.

Now, how to FMQ the houses? I considered close together vertical lines in the triangular shaped gables. I considered fish tail scallops on the gold house. I considered a brick pattern on the brick colored house. Then the acronym KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid – hit me like a lead brick. I'd consider myself an idiot if I put in something so complicated I would be ripping it all out again. I switched to my domestic Pfaff and straight stitched lines both ⅛" inside and ⅛" outside the doors and windows. I also added straight lines outlining the house itself. Yes, I did need to do a fair amount of turning, but that turning took me far less time to put in, than those first crooked lines took me to take out. So that the stitch lines did not look too plain, I kept with my choice of the slate blue thread I had used everywhere else. The seam lines looked a bit like the decorative top stitching on jeans and I was pleased with the effect.

I am much happier with the final wallhanging. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do what makes you happy – advice about "visibility from a galloping horse" be damned.