The September Block is Liberated House

House blocks seem to be the Liberated Quilting classic and no liberated year of the Block Lotto would be complete without them and so . . . here we go ;-)

Our block this month will be an 8 inch (finished size) Liberated House.  Maree–one of last month's winners–made this lovely example.


BLOCK GUIDELINES/PATTERN INFO

You may use ANY directions for making a liberated (or "wonky") house block which is 8-1/2 inches square to finish at 8 inches AND which follows the guidelines below.

 If you own one of Gwen Marston's books which includes directions for creating a Liberated House, feel free to use it as a reference.

You can also download WonkyTown from Tonya Ricucci's tutorial page on her UnRuly Quilter website.

I hope to find time (soon, but maybe not until the weekend) to publish directions on how to DRAW a PFP template for paper piecing a Liberated House–if you have known me long enough, you might remember the crooked house swap from 2001 ... and even have a copy of those directions which are close to the guidelines for our houses this month:

Your houses must have the following characteristics:

• A pointed roof - if your liberated block comes out too large and you need to trim off the point, it's OK--it can be an implied pointed roof ;-)
  
• One Door
  
• At least one Window
  
• No lawn in front of the house (by which I mean that the bottom edge of the house is the bottom edge of the block, though you may have "sky" on each side.)

Note that Tonya's Wonky Town directions include an OPTIONAL chimney.  Whether or not you decide to add one to your liberated house is entirely up to you.

As usual, you may make up to a maximum of NINE BLOCKS this month.

FABRIC CHOICES

For this month:

• The sky MUST be a TURQUOISE fabric.  It may be solid or a tone-on-tone print.  It can be lighter or darker turquoise, but NOT anything that would be called blue but not turquoise.
  
• You must use at least one RED fabric.  It may be a solid, tone-on-tone print or a multi-color print that is predominately RED and will "read as" RED from across the room.
  
• You must use at least one predominately WHITE fabric.  It may be a solid, white-on-white print or two color print that is more than 50% white.  If you use a black & white print, for example, it must have MORE white than black in the fabric design. 

If you use a RED on WHITE print–again, more white than red–it will fulfill BOTH the requirement for a RED fabric (although it slightly breaks that rule) AND the requirement for a WHITE fabric.

All other fabric choices are up to you.  If you would like to fussy cut characters or other things so that they appear in your doors and windows, that is OK (but not required.) If you are making multiple blocks to enter, you may use the same turquoise sky fabric for all your blocks.  You may also repeat your other fabrics as long as you make each house unique by changing up the placement of any repeated fabrics.

SOME INSPIRATION FROM THE SNEAK PEEKERS

The following blocks were made by sneak peekers, Caroline (5), Cathy (6), Gail (1),  Ginny (1), Janet S. (2--only 1 appears below because of technical difficulties) and Maree (4).

Click any of these images for a better look.  Because I was able to include pretty large virtual blocks this month, I will not be reposting the original photos.

LABELS FOR BLOG POSTS THIS MONTH

Please make my life easier by adding these labels to your blog posts this month:

liberated house - use this label for any blog post related to the topic, from posting your own block to sharing a photo or link to an inspirational quilt made from liberated houses to messages NEXT month when you are mailing your blocks to the winner (or receiving them because YOU are one of the winners ;-) 

Sep 2010 photos - add this label to any blog post which contains photos of lotto blocks this month.  (FYI, I use this one when I want to make sure I haven't left out anyone's block . . . don't let me "lose" any of yours by not including this label.