New Orleans House Project

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Scrappy Houses: Adding Wonky Borders

One of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge projects in 2013 was making house blocks using Bonnie Hunter's Happy, Scrappy Houses pattern.  I called my efforts the New Orleans House Project, and as I made my blocks, I tried to find New Orleans houses in the monthly challenge colors.  At the end of the year, I wasn't ready to assemble the blocks into a quilt top, so I put them away while I thought about how I wanted my New Orleans quilt to look.

These are my purple houses from 2013.  As you can see, I did not add the wonky borders Bonnie used on her blocks.  I finally decided those wonky borders were in keeping with how I wanted my finished New Orleans House Project quilt to look - so that's one of my RSC projects for this year. 

I don't want the wonky borders to be the same color as the house block, so I'll be picking the borders based on each month's RSC challenge color.  I looked through my purple scraps and matched scraps to houses.  I cut rectangles 3 inches by 12 inches for the borders.

The rectangles are cut diagonally lengthwise to create the border pieces.  The direction the lengthwise cut is made determines if the house runs "uphill" or "downhill".  The straight of grain side of each triangle gets sewn to the block.  

Plainly I need to be more careful about how I cut the border triangles if I want my houses to go uphill AND downhill!

There is more scrappy inspiration at the RSC weekly link-up.  I haven't had a chance to check out what everyone is working on, so I've got my evening's entertainment planned!