Tag: Christmas

A Christmas Garden

We have a new Christmas quilt in our house this year.

This large quilt was finished earlier this year, but I wanted to share it at Christmastime.  It hasn’t been on a photo shoot outdoors yet, but here are some shots and its stitching story.

The design is from a Barb Adams and Alma Allen book, Where the Cold Wind Blows.  The pattern Mistletoe and Holly looks quite different in their version, but the appliqué basket is their creation.

I had this fabulous toile-like fabric that looked a bit Christmasey to me, with lots of green and brown and red.  Wanting to leave big swatches of that intact in the background, I chose to do minimal piecing.  

I did like the pieced stars that Barb and Alma had included, so I pieced a few stars.  

One it was assembled, it needed a bit more color, so I inked my initials and their title Mistletoe and Holly in red.  

It needed a bit more red, so birds flew in and landed in some spaces.

I was teaching paper foundation piecing, so used that technique to add a spiky border.

I quilted it on my Juki with a combination of freemotion echoing and several filler designs.

I chose to give my version the title A Christmas Garden.  It measures 60” x 78”.

Christmas Quilts

I love to stitch with the colors of the season.  I know professional artists have to work ahead of the season, getting seasonal prints, cards, books ready during the summer for Christmas, working on Easter themes during snowstorms.  Not me.

I love to sew on pumpkin colored fabrics in the fall, pastels in the Spring, and give me some red and green to stitch while the tree is up.

Right now, I’m stitching on a project called Mistletoe and Holly (that’s the name given to it by the designers, Barb Adams and Alma Allen – and my working title now.  But as the stitching goes on and the design evolves within my life, that name is subject to change).  This is a design I’ve loved for years.

Here is a photo of their finished product. This Christmas season finds me stitching on lots of bindings, finishing some projects for gifts, some for our guild’s upcoming quilt show.  But I had to start a red and green project or the season wouldn’t feel right to me.

Earlier in December, I stitched this wool appliqué piece from a block-of-the-month from Maggie Bonanomi.  I believe this project will be in her book coming out in 2018.

 

 

My quilt ladder shows evidence of my fascination with red and green.  In the center is Five Seasons in Bonaire folded with the Christmas season showing.  The top and bottom are Tree Farm of Lorane and Small Tree Farm. These are two sizes of a quilt I designed and made for my daughter’s family a few years ago.  Friends saw it, loved the simple technique, and patterns were born.

Pomegranates and Poinsettias is in the dining room, Miss Lily’s Baskets are in a basket, and a red and green Irish Chain I made for a challenge one year (but did not enter it, I liked another project better for the competition) are around, too.  Detailed descriptions of these projects in earlier posts are here and here.

 

Above the playhouse hutch, a Santa marches through the woods (based on a design by Jan Patek).  Just as I finished this piece a couple of years ago (needed something seasonal to fit the space), I found the wooden Santa you see on the top shelf marching along in an antique store.  Serendipity!  Oh,  we do know how to spell Noel in our house, but when I bought these blocks in the 1980’s, Jim said to the clerk, “Do you think I should be worried?  I don’t know anyone named Leon.  Why do you think my wife is buying this?”  Her laughter still rings in our ears.  So as a tribute to that memory, we sometimes display the blocks that way.  I forgot to move them when I took the photo.

If history repeats itself, the Mistletoe and Holly thing will be part of next year’s display.  I have another couple of ideas in my brain, too.  But the ideas sometimes flow faster than these fingers can stitch, so only time will tell how much gets done.