house

I finished watching Angel Season Five yesterday. I was blubbering like a big giant baby. Can't believe that's it - there'll never be any more. At least it went out on a high point - can't say I thought much of Buffy Season Seven. Next up is The Shield Season Three. I so love DVDs.

Here's how to improvisationally piece a house. No templates, no stress.

Cut a couple different widths of your house material (I've got way more than that cut, but you don't have to) with the max width approximately 1.5". These don't need to be long strips.

Next cut out a rectangle for a door and a square for a window.

Sew some house fabric to the side of the door and above the window.

Okay, more house fabric on the other side of the door and below the window.

And some fabric above the door:

Attach the two units together.

Trim it even and add house fabric to the side.

Add some sky fabric to either side of the house.

This is a quicky roof. Lay the bottom of the house on top of the roof fabric, leaving a corner of the roof sticking out. You want about an inch of roofing on either side of the house. Slice the roof triangle off.

I shaved the sides of the roof down a tiny bit so that I didn't have such a strong 90 degree angle.

The next step is to cut out a rectangle of sky fabric. It needs to stick out about an inch farther on either side from the edges of the house block. And it needs to be a couple of inches higher than the peak of the roof.

Lay your ruler on top of the roof and slice all the way across the sky rectangle. Set it aside.
Then cut the other side in the same manner.

You should now have two pieces of sky vaguely shaped like this (plus a sky triangle that you can use as a roof on a different house):

Now make a slice thru the bigger triangle for a chimney.

Pick out a rectangle or square for your chimney and sew it to the end of a sky strip. This works much easier if you leave the strip long.

Attach the chimney strip to the larger bit of sky.

Trim it even and then add the smaller triangle.

Meanwhile, attach the roof the other side of the sky.

Trim the excess sky off (this will either be at the top or bottom of the roof, depending on how you added the roof. Either works).

Then sew the chimney section of sky onto the roof section. Trim even. This is terrible to admit, but I got so carried away with sewing, that I forgot to take a picture of the roof with both sides of the sky added. D'oh. Anyway, you can figure that part out.

Sew the sky section onto the bottom house section, trim it up, and you should have something along the line of this:

This is just the most basic of houses. There are so many different variations. You can change the number of windows, the side of the house they're on, etc.

One of my favorite ways to build a house is to take a look at a house block that I like and try to follow the blueprint. My house never looks the same as the original, but it gives me a direction to go in. I've got loads of examples of house blocks in both my blog and my pages on Quiltville. Take a look.