“Charmville Revisited” Finished!

In recent posts I’ve blogged about the process of making a kid-friendly, scrappy quilt patterned after the original “Charmville” wall quilt published by McCall’s Quick Quilts. We left off with the patchwork houses needing a border. I chose orange to compliment the tiny orange flowers in the green “lawn” print of chicks.

The orange tone-on-tone is printed with a directional texture that mimics European tile roofs, perfect texture for a house quilt! (Click on the picture to enlarge it and view the texture). Dilemma:  How to treat the corners of the quilt, showing the texture to best advantage. Without piecing, the width-of-fabric border strips were not long enough to miter the corners.  Rather than piecing the border strips, I decided to add Nine Patches as corner blocks. I pieced 1 3/4″ squares together with a yellow square in the center. Since the unfinished width of the Nine Patches is 4 1/4,” I cut the orange border strips this width.

My thread choices for quilting were light gray (which tends to blend with everything!) or light yellow. Unspooled, gray looked white against the orange border and darker house areas. So I settled on the yellow; it blends nicely in the orange border, the sky, and most of the house areas. The quilting design is a freehand watery ripple.

To finish off, I bound the quilt with a black print with white zigzags. Grandson Kaleb is helping me level out the clothesline during the photo shoot. “Charmville Revisited,” made with 2″ squares is on the left; the original “Charmville,” made with 1 1/2″ squares is on the right.

Constructing a home for my lonely Nine Patch house orphan block has been fun and rewarding. A toddler is sure to love cuddling in this quilt! And guess what, I have another house orphan block made with 2 1/2″ squares. It looks like we’ll be revisiting “Charmville” again in the next month or two.