What's on my design wall

A few people commented on the house blocks up on my design wall. These are the house blocks from a pattern called Patchwork Cottage by The Rabbit Factory. I made these blocks back in 2005 or 2006 as part of a Saturday Sampler class at a local quilt shop. (The shop has moved and changed owners since the time of this class.) My friend Susan and I would meet one Saturday morning a month at the shop. For an initial fee of $5 and the cost of the pattern, you got a kit to make a block. As long as you completed your block by the next month's meeting, you got your next little kit free! It was a great deal!

There's a real mix of fabric lines in there--and while I like the original pattern, I am *really* changing it quite a bit: adding two more house blocks (have designed Greek Cross and Churn Dash lower borders for them), adding paper pieced trees, adding some big double star blocks, and adding some blocks with spiky curvilinear pieces ala Barbara Barber.....it will end up around king size before all is said and done. (You can ask my bee mates--I'm not a small quilt person!)

The colors are reds, browns/tans, forest greens, turquoises, etc. It is EXTREMELY scrappy (another one of my quilty habits) with lots of larger scale prints--my friend Susan, who is a bumblebee quilter (see this post to see what that means) has rightly pointed out that because there is going to be a lot going on in this design I'm going to need to pull the design together and anchor it around a central color or two. Right now I'm leaning toward either red or turquoise or maybe both. I pulled this out of storage to make it my "travelling" project to take to bees with my Featherweight.