Little House

This is what I finally focused on yesterday. I call  it "Home is Where the Heart Is".  It is 22 1/2 inches wide and 19 inches long.It was a fun little piece to do and I can hang it up for Valentines Day and I can also use it with my summer patriotic quilts.  Almost 20 years ago I made a quilt using a kind of pinwheel pattern from the book "Log Cabin in the Round " by Barbara Schaffeld and Bev Vickery. I learned a valuable  lesson from that quilt; always make a test block before you make 25 blocks that are the wrong size to fit with the other blocks. This time I evaluated the blocks as I went along and with 20 years more experience it was easy to figure how to make some  adjustments so that the heart was a more pleasing shape and to work out a way to put the little house in there in place of 2  Log Cabin blocks. It was fun to revisit this technique and I may play with these rounded Log Cabin blocks again soon. 

So.....what do you do when your piecing turns out very good but something about it is not visually pleasing? This was not an easy decision.My seams were all nice and straight and the piece was nice and flat. This does not always happen for me; some days I have trouble with straight seams. However the little house looked to me like it was sliding downhill. It was centered on the  center section but it was not centered on the heart. Do I really need to get that picky about this little piece? This is after all a little fun project. In the end I decided it bothered me and that was enough reason to fix it. I took out one strip at the top  of the little house and put it at the bottom and I am satisfied. I will not be tempted to explain that I really should have placed the house a little bit higher. Why do we do that?  Who else really cares.