My Dresden Neighborhood

This is my version of the Dresden Neighborhood pattern. I cut one wedge out of every Grunge fabric that I owned. I asked my granddaughter to put them in any order she'd like. Knowing there were more wedges than necessary she had some room for creativity.  I bought her a Nintendo Switch for Christmas and I could not get her to look away from that device and pay attention to what I was asking her to do, so her mother put the wedges in complimentary color order - that's how she described it. There were 7 wedges left over when she was done.

The funny thing about this pattern is that it tells you to sew together 20 wedges. In order for me to get the wedges to meet in a nice circle I needed to use 21.

It was great fun to design the roofs and add the windows and doors. The struggle for me was the center. I made a few versions that I thought would fit and once I sewed them down, I hated them. Then I saw my little pile of selvages and Viola! ... a new idea was born. I took all the shades of green and sewed them together to make the center circle. The selvages are nicely frayed so if you could look close, it looks like grass. It was so fun.

The next struggle was quilting. I put the piece on my longarmer and decided to try some ruler work on it. Once I stitched a section down, I didn't like how perfectly straight my lines were. I think the quilting needed to me wonky, like the houses. So I marked off sections of the top and free-motioned wonky lines all around the houses. What fun! I loved making this so much that I have another version in the works.