More Than Meets the Eye...

I once heard a take-off on a familiar saying that kind of stuck with me when it cames to trying out new stitching methods. It goes like this: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." That was a little of how I felt getting into the creation of this small "Happy Villages" quilt. There are tons of mistakes, but still the process as a whole was worthwhile. It took some time as I cut, and glued, and netted, and stitched my way to completion of a fantasy town using the instructions in Karen Eckmeier's book. Making the village is quite a spontaneous and whimsical exercise. And the project built some new skills that will hopefully take me to more achitectural and landscape quilts.

Here's the instruction book I used. It's full of clear directions and inspiring ideas. You can see more of Karen's villages on her Quilted Lizard website here.

I was working on the project around Christmas, and it had me looking at Christmas cards in a new way. I kept several of them that had village scenes and have tucked them into the book. I could see this card serving as the inspiration for a wintry village. All in all, a fun project worth repeating!