My Square for Leslie's ECRR Round One

Leslie made it easy for each player to know what they could do. She specified that the center two squares should be a country house and that the remaining squares should be nature/country. She also simplified the process of choosing colors because she let us know that the batik background fabric should be our source of color inspiration. The colors were beautiful pastels of lavender, minty green and pale yellow. I was the fifth person to get Leslie's ECRR and when I saw Patti's work, I wondered if I should work on the upper right square instead of having my work next to something so well done. Then I remembered my purpose in joining the ECRR was to learn and grow my skills.





I have to admit when I saw the 1/2" of Patti's cottage square, I was impressed with her lovely work. I had been looking at cottages and photos of cottages for weeks before the project arrived. I had been looking at photos of English cottages with thatched roofs, so it was delightful to see a portion of thatched roof in Patti's square. Well, I set out to try to duplicate the roof that Patti did and that was not an easy task. I bought embroidery floss in colors that matched Patty's roof and worked with blending and long and short stitches, but couldn't get the look right. My stitches just didn't have the random coloration and mine looked to patterned. I finally went to a Needlework shop four towns away and had the shop owner look at the work. He sold me some new variegated hand dyed threads to use and told me yes it was short long stitch. I kept making samples and just couldn't get the same beautiful look. I had to settle for what I was capable of doing.



Patti also used a wonderful stone fabric for her house in pale gray shades. I tried to hand paint some similar fabric with no luck. Finally found a fabric with some shades of gray and colors in the roof that I used for the cottage. I created a stencil to the scale of Patti's stone fabric and lightly stenciled gray over my fabric. Then I did some machine stitching to try and give it more texture.



I added a door with a window over the top. I painted the door and window and added some stitching to give it more definition.



I could see some needle felted wool on the edge of Patti's square so I added more felted wool to blend with Patti's and used it to add a path to the door. My roof looked so crude next to Patti's that I knew I needed to cover it. More needle felted wool to cover the union of Patti's roof with my roof. Then I needed to hide the other side of my roof. I used tulle and water soluble stabilizer to machine embroider a tree. The stitching was so heavy on the roof that I had to paint quilt batting to add under the tree, so there was a more even ground to applique the tree down. I added beads to the tree to decorate it and to tack it down to the base fabric.



I used embroidery floss to add flowers at the foundation of the house and added beads to mimic flowers.


I added the stone fabric to make the chimney because it reminded me of a small bit of stone looking beads seen on Leslie's square.