Summersville Sunday: Blocks 21 - 24

I thought I'd try something different for this Summersville post and make a mosaic of this week's four blocks, rather than posting individual photos - thanks for the idea, Jude!

I started this project in 2012 as a 'sitting on the settee and watching telly with no prep required' project and slowly but surely embroidered all 49 blocks, but fell behind (mild understatement!) in blogging about them so I'm catching up with a weekly post.

The squares will be pieced into a quilt, set between nine patches on point (not yet made) and with some sort of background (not yet chosen or even looked for).  I hope the top will be finished by, well, the end of the decade would be nice!  Then I can start thinking about how to quilt it *grin*

You can find the other posts in the series here: blocks 1 - 4; blocks 5 - 8; blocks 9 - 12; blocks 13 - 16; blocks 17 - 20.

All the embroidery in blocks 21 and 22 were done with split stitch, and blocks 23 and 24 were done with back stitch - not the most interesting of stitches to do but I like the result!

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When embroidering these small house squares, I usually picked some sort of rule to follow which made choosing which things to embroider a little easier and more interesting.  Sometimes I'd embroider all the conifer trees and nothing else, other times it would be all the houses with triangular roofs, or I'd pick six colours and use one once in each position (house/roof/chimney/windows/doors/smoke) so that all six houses were different but tied together by the colours.

Often, it's easier to get a feel for what has been embroidered when you look at the back (woven cotton interfacing was applied to the back of each square so that thread ends didn't shadow through and to allow slightly heavier embroidery than would otherwise be possible):

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I quite like arranging all the threads used in the block around it as I often find that the subtle shade changes aren't as obvious in photos as they are in person:

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Archie wanted me to show you that he doesn't just signal with his left ear.  I'm not entirely sure what he's signalling in these photos, but I'm willing to bet it's about biscuits!

And when, exactly, do I get paid for all this modelling?

Thanks for popping in!

P.S.  After asking permission from my friend, whose workshop sample it was based on, I'm planning to write a tutorial for the machine needle book in my last post - I need to provide two tutorials for the 2016 FAL and this will be one of them.  My day isn't for quite a while (the first one is in October, so don't come looking for it next week!), but I'm going to start thinking about any alterations I'd like to make to this one and may even choose the fabrics!