It's Anna's Fault . . .

If you don't want to be tempted to buy stuff and if you have plenty of projects and don't want any more, click away now. But if you do read through and it causes you to spend some money, you should know that Anna's to blame.  Yes, I know you'll want to blame me, but Anna's at the root of it

A little bit before Christmas, I popped over to visit Anna at her Woolie Mammoth blog, and she was sponsoring some giveaways.  But what really got my attention was her completed Country Homecoming quilt.  Have you seen it?  Here it is--

Do you remember this blog quilt-along Anne of Cottons 'n Wool hosted awhile back?  I started to play along, using brighter fabrics, and then I decided I wasn't all that excited about my houses.  Anna's finished quilt got me excited again, and I've had some homespun fabrics set aside for a little while now until I was ready to try again.  I've decided this is one of the projects I'll work on in 2014.  Would you like to join me?  But I'll tell you more about that in a minute.

The other thing Anna did was to show some of her completed projects on the blog posts I looked at and that sent me searching for a few of the patterns I saw there.  And I found The Wooden Acorn Etsy shop--love, LOVE, L-O-V-E that site.  Are you brave enough to take a look?  If so, click HERE.  But don't say I didn't warn you!

Now, if you're interested in joining me in making the Country Homecoming quilt, the pattern is in the book Primitive Gatherings, Quilts and Accessories.  A great book, but if you don't already have it, I'll warn you it's gone up in price in recent years and although Amazon lists some used copies, they aren't cheap.  But if you compare it to the cost of other BOM patterns and consider this is not nearly the only pattern in the book . . . .  Well, let's just say I'm pretty good a justifying spending money, and I think you see where I'm going with this argument.  Here's what the book looks like if you want to hunt through your quilt books to see if you already own it:

The houses are pieced with just the windows and doors appliqued on and the border applique as well.  I think I might modify the pattern so the windows are also pieced in.  My plan is to make two house blocks a month.  Anna made nine blocks but the pattern has twelve total, so that's six months of houses and then another month or two to work on the border applique.  Email me if you want to join in and we'll set up a schedule.  In the meantime, here's a list of people who participated in Anne's original quilt along and links to some of their project posts if you'd like to take a look:

Sandy and Anne (Sandy doesn't have a blog, so Anne shared her photo)
Paulette
Patty
Shazy
Sandy R.

I'll post photos of my first two blocks sometime before the end of January.