Build Me A House

I dream of houses.
I dream of houses with quilt blocks on their sides, or quilty houses I can make any size.
This started when I was asked to help beta test for BlockBase+ and began to see some possibilities of putting a block within a block. So I thought I would share how I did this. (News about the giveaway is at the end.)

One way to export their images is by SVG, which means Scalable Vector Graphic. That means I can take this image and scale it (change the size) and everything will stay in proportion. I about fell over in happiness when I found out this was available in BlockBase+. That means I can take out lines, add lines, take out and add shapes, all using the basic image from BB+. So I did some of that.

So take one house, add a Double X (using the Brackman ID number to help you find it), and combine them:

Now I have a Shoo-Fly House.

Here’s my Ohio Star House.

Last is the Eight-Pointed Star House.

Combine them all and you have a house-warming gift for a friend or a small wallhanging for yourself (depending on what size you make your basic house and their blocks). If you don’t have a digital design program, change that section of the house by making your block, sashing it on top and fitting it into the space where the two front windows are.

I worked up what I call PatternLite that has all the info about this particular block merging: four snappy yellow-and-white blocks into blue houses.

It normally costs five bucks, but you can use the coupon below to get it for half-price. And inside is another discount coupon for any of the patterns in my shop. This PatternLite is nine pages of instruction and includes templates for the odd parts of the house, above, plus info on the four different smaller blocks.

Take this coupon and head over to PayHip, if you’d like to nab my Build Me a House PatternLite.

The last thing I want to show is how you can swap elements of one block for another.

I have been in love with this block forever, ever since way back in the day, a Flickr group did it for a Halloween online bee block.

But they have a straight stem and I see a curved stem in the BB+ version. This is no problemo, my quilty friend. Swap the stems!

Since both of these are based on a nine-patch block, I can just print the templates for 1740, then print just the stem patch for 1735 (by using the Preview, I can delete patches I don’t want to print), and then swap that part of the block.

If I wanted to just rotary cut them all, I could use this chart (which is the Rotary Cutting Chart of the Export Menu). It will tell you how many to cut of one size, if you change the “Calculations for:” above. However, it will not tell me how much fabric to buy or to pull. I hope that is coming in a future version!

Jennifer (jeifner on IG) was the winner of the giveaway. I typed/copied everyone’s names from Instagram as well as names from comments on the blog posts on this website. I used Google’s Random Number Generator to select the winner, so congratulations, Jenn!

Thank you very much to every one, for all your kind and interesting comments. I enjoyed reading them very much. I also want to say a thank you to The Electric Quilt Company for generously offering up a package of software for me to giveaway. I did ask them if they were having any discounts for people who might want to buy this software. Apparently they always have a site-wide sale over Memorial Day, if you are interested in purchasing this for yourself.

Happy Quilting, everyone!