Cottage Grove, Cottage 4

 Making progress on my Cottage Grove quilt. My friend, Darlene, is also making one and we zoom on Fridays to keep each other going. We were meeting here at my house, but then she had to go into quarantine as she has her first grandbaby due to arrive next week.  

There are 5 cottages in the quilt and we just completed #4.  The pattern was meant for fusible applique, which I prefer needle turn.  Some of the applique is very small and detailed,so often the case with fusible.  Anyway, this block required a little blue bird on the chimney and a rather small birdhouse.  The houses have lots of pieces and the first two that we made, we machine pieced it all.  More recently I have been drawing the paper piecing foundation pieces in EQ and mine are coming out so much better, precise and way easier to make.  Darlene is enjoying the paper piecing as well.

I decided to embroider the top of the chimney and the little blue bird.  I do love blue birds and I may have to put one on top of the birdhouse too.  I may use my fabric pens to color in the bird and the chimney top - but then again I may not.

The bird house was a real challenge.  First I embroidered the whole house, and it was a disaster, just did not look right.  So then I decided to try applique.  I pressed the edges under and then used Roxanne's glue to hold them in place (house and pole) while I machine straight stitched them.  I could probably have done a better job if I had hand appliqued, but what can I say, I wanted to get 'er done. I had some baby rick rack in white that I colored brown with fabric pens and used that for the roof. 

Its rather primitive looking, but hey, if I tried to build it from wood it would probably look just like this.  I am satisfied with it, actually kind of like it.  Guess I should have removed the random threads before taking the picture.