Month 2 "Peacock Cottages" was the next installment of the mystery button club "Seaside Town" by Lynette Anderson Designs. Although this block arrived back at the beginning of May, I'd only made a start on it at a few weeks ago. The cottages are made with foundation piecing, a technique that I hadn't done before. Lynette has written a useful tutorial for foundation piecing which is on her website. (I made a practise block a few weeks ago, and used that block for the centre of a journal cover). I used some Paper Solvy to print the foundation pieced templates on, and was very pleased with the results. The first cottage was rather time consuming, and took about 3 hrs to make...
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...I didn't want to admit defeat, and the next one was completed in just under an hour! Well I couldn't stop at just 2, and a couple of hours later 2 more cottages were also foundation pieced ready for use later in the quilt. I used Aurifil 50wt thread for piecing as always, and used a Superior Titanium Microtex size 60 needle for the piecing. I'd bought a couple of packets of these needles to try out from Barnyarns a few months ago, and they really do stay super sharp. The paper Solvy is quite thin, and a shorter than usual stitch length means the paper tears away quite easily...
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...these 2 cottages were joined together, and the stitchery designs were traced using a lightbox and a Micron Pigma pen for the peacocks on the roof, and a Sewline white pencil for the flowers and birds on the grass. Valdani variegated threads were used for the hand embroidery. The variegation is very subtle, and prevents the colours from looking "flat". And here is the completed "Peacock Cottages" - those birds perched on top of the chimneys reminded me of our holiday to the Isle of Wight back in April, when we visited a very quaint little village that was full of thatched cottages and a very proud peacock was strutting around the village! The cute wooden hand painted button will be stitched in place once the quilt is completed. The next installment has some more foundation pieced cottages that are even smaller that these ones, so that will keep me busy!
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