The Mahone Bay Quilt Guild hosted a workshop via zoom this month – the Dresden Neighborhood, designed by Kim Lapecek of Persimon Dreams and taught by Michelle Banton, of Lunenburg, Mass. I participated along with 22 other quilters, to make our own versions of the Dresden Neighborhood.

Many quilters are familiar with a Dresden plate quilt square. If you aren’t, take away the windows and doors in the above version of my neighborhood and you have the quilt block. Simple! The angle of wedge determines the number of ‘houses’ you need to cut out. My version has 22 wedges.

I choose to use all Batik fabrics. These fabrics are hand dyed, stamped with intricate wax resist designs and cured in the sunshine. They are also very tightly woven and not exactly hand embroidery friendly. The white cotton backing has clouds all over it. As I didn’t want the clouds to standout, I used the back of the fabric.

Making the windows was time consuming. The windows shown below are constructed from small black squares fused to a larger piece and cut to size.

The yellow and blue fabric below was perfect for windows. Selecting and cutting a suitably sized piece was based on where they fit on the houses. The middle image shows other designs used for windows and doors. The third image shows a completed section of the Dresden Neighborhood.

The process was fun and sometimes frustrating. It starts with colour selection for the houses. It continued with cutting the wedges of varying lengths, and adding roofs, doors and windows. Some people in the class added decorative stitches when sewing the houses together. One quilter made hers unique by adding trees. Christmas and Halloween themes were popular. If you visit the Mahone Bay Quilt Guild, you will even see a Gnome (Dresden) Neighborhood.

My project isn’t quite finished yet. I will put up a new post when it is finished.