Housing Projects

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Housing Projects!
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Here's how to improvisationally piece a basic house. No templates, no stress.

Cut a couple strips of different widths from your house fabric (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. The terms 'rectangle' and 'square' are relative, they don't have to be exactly even!

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

Add more house fabric on the other side of the door and below the window. And another strip of fabric fabric above the door.

Sew the two house sections together.Trim it even and add another piece ofhouse fabric to the right side of the window.

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 (the one on the right side of the roof) to insert 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 remaining sky triangle.

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!

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, which side the chimney is 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 but do it freehand from strips like this. 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 the gallery section!

What if you didn't leave enough space for seam allowance between the roof and sky sections? Whack off the top of the house. I just cropped this one in the pic, so I have a straight line across the top, but it could certainly be more angular. House roofs are not all peaky! Some are flat!

You could also take it even further down for an even flatter roof!

Here are some more of my flat top houses. Did I make them deliberately or were they "accidents" - there's no way to know.

And Onto Wonkier Houses!

The basic house was pretty tame, in my mind anyway. I like my houses a bit wilder. All it takes is one change. On the Whacky House, the door slants inwards at the sides and the top slopes diagonally. Otherwise, I'm pretty much going to build the house in the same manner as the basic house, it's just that the workmen are tipsy.

One trick I used on this house was to sew the window onto the end of a strip - that way I know that section isn't going to be too short.

After sewing the window section on, I trimmed everything and then decided I didn't want quite so much slant to the sides of the house, so I straightened them up a bit to decrease that angle. I like how that changes the look of the window - it's not going to be square anymore.

I'm going to angle the side of the sky piece so that I won't end up with bias along the edge of the block. See how the inside edge of the sky piece matches the angle of the side of the house? Sew sky pieces to both sides of the house.

I cut out an oversized triangle shaped roof with steeper sides for this house (shown down below) and I then cut out a big rectangle of sky,(shown above) just like I did for the "basic" house. But I want to keep the angle on the top of this house AND not worry about bias all along the top of the block so I'm going to angle the bottom of the sky so that it matches the angle of the top of the house section. I just sliced along here.

I then trimmed the background fabric around the roof shape, just like with the basic house. And made a slice for the chimney. But the wonky house needs a funkier chimney, so I used an angled chimney fabric strip AND sewed it to the end of a wider sky strip. After sewing that in, I trimmed it up.

And then layed the chimney section over the sky section and sliced at an angle through both sections to have the angles match for sewing them together.

The chimney is actually not as wonky than I was expecting - guess I didn't angle it as much as I should/could have. You'll notice that the smaller sky section on the right of the roof was sewn on so that there's extra sky peaking out on top beyond the roof. Just gonna slice that sky off even with the roof. And then sew the big chimney section sky onto the roof.

I've got enough sky and roof that I can move my house section more to the left or the right. Too much to the right might mean I lose a bit of that roof corner when the block is sewn to the next block, but that would be okay. I could also decide at this stage that this roof is just way too big and could slice an inch or so off the bottom of the roof section - that would make it not such a tall roof.

And here it all is sewn together. For now I'll leave the sky extra big, so I can angle one or both sides of the block if I choose to. I'll trim it to size when I decide which quilt it is going to be used in!