Building a Post Office and Mercantile

As I said in my post last weekend, I was going to switch up my #BuildingBlockSal project.  I still have two blocks to finish on Jack Frost’s Tree Farm but I wanted to get some progress on my Hometown Holidays stitch.

Here’s the photo I showed of where I left off on it.

But when I decided to start working on it last weekend I first had to go backwards!  Never a good direction to go.   That partial building on the far left – I don’t know what I did but I realized I had started stitching one chart, had put it aside for a while and when I pulled it back up last year/last time I worked on it, I continued with a different chart so it was a mess.  And, since I decided I wanted to stitch the charts  to represent the buildings in the village where I grew up, that building just had to go and it was demolished (ripped out).    And here is what I put in its place  – our village had a post office so I stitched the post office chart.

Here’s a photo of the actual post office.  Of course, there was no house delivery, so everyone had to go downtown to get their mail.

After the post office, I decided to stitch the Mercantile chart below.   (I’m just picking colors as I go along so sometimes the colors are similar to the charts and sometimes I just choose a color as the mood strikes.  Note the bike color below – it’s the color of my very first bike.)  🙂

The “mercantile”    will become “Mary’s”.    When I was in high school a new shop was opened .  Mary’s of Montfort was a women’s clothing store and in the back (which I was most excited about) she carried sewing patterns (one brand if I remember correctly) and a small selection of sewing fabric and supplies.  Since I was very much into sewing my own clothes, having fabric available was very exciting. (And I remember Mom taking me there to get my outfit for my first job interview.)   Anyway, the mercantile chart has a dress on a headless mannequin in the window (perfect for a women’s store) and the other window as charted has “est.” and then a year.   I won’t stitch that but instead will stitch some bolts of fabric lined up across that other window.

I’ve been collecting old photos (many from the 1920’s) of the village  as it’s interesting to see what was there then and when I grew up there.  Here’s an old photo of the building that Mary’s went into. Not sure how old this photo is – likely 20’s or 30’s – definitely before the streets were paved.  Mary’s went into that building on the corner with the awning in the late ’70s.

And here’s my street as it stands right now.

I should be able to get Mary’s finished off today (if I ever stop putzing around) and start the next building.  I have room for one more on this street.  I was just going to do a single street but I have plenty of fabric so I will add another street above this one.