A Quilt of Christmas Past

Hi, I thought I would share a special quilt I completed for last Christmas. Christmas tends to be an extra stressful time for me. I know it can be a stressful time for anyone, but it tends to be more self-inflicted on my part. I can be like Clark Griswold, not with the decorations for Christmas but with my gift giving and gift making. Last year after my Mom passed away, I only made one quilt for a Christmas gift and that went to my Dad. This year I am trying to do better and I got an early start on my sewing so I am trying to eliminate the 2-3 AM sewing marathons the entire week before Christmas.

I made a special Christmas quilt for our family. I never had a quilt to use with my Christmas decorating. We had upgraded to a new tree and purchased new ornaments and lights, eliminating the missmatched items from the previous 26 years of Christmases. What actually started the Christmas quilt project was making Christmas stockings for our family. We had not used stockings in years and since we now had grandchildren, it was time for new ones.

I  had purchased 7 different 1/2 yard pieces of M’Liss Rae Hawley Christmas prints from Hancock Fabrics. I love her prints showing her little Weiner dog. They are a lot of fun. I drew out my own stocking pattern and did some simple quilting making my own prequilted fabric with using a layer of muslin as my batting to make the fronts. I used a single layer of muslin as backs of my stockings. I made my cuffs from a remnant of white fake fur. I cut a strip of the matching fabrics and sewed it to the backside of the fur and pulled to the front and topstitched as binding. Matching fabric as the hanging loops.

Since I only used half of my 1/2 yards of fabrics, I decided to make a throw size quilt with the leftovers. I was inspired by the quilt on this book. I used every piece of my purchased Christmas prints left from making the stockings. I added muslin and navy blue fabrics from my stash. I even made a pieced binding from the last bits of fabrics. This was a really “green” Christmas project as I even used left over cotton quilt batting from cutting off extras from previous made quilts. I just laid the batting pieces edges butted together and zigzagged over the seams. It layed really nicely and you could not tell it was not one whole piece in the end.

And here is the finished back.

I added some red stripes to help frame up my Christmas prints. It added extra interest to the navy backing.

I really like how my quilt turned out. It is just the right size for snuggling with in my favorite chair. With today being Halloween, it is just too early to pull it out of the closet. I will try to hold off to December 1st.

Thank you for looking over my Christmas quilt and stocking project. I feel like I have a good start to my Christmas gift sewing this year. I finished up the Batik High Tea quilt and that will be going to a special friend. I have two other tops pieced and ready for quilting, my Broken Frames and my Patriotic Square in Squares. And since I have 54 days of potential sewing…who knows what else I can create.

I will be linking up my quilt finish with various linky parties this week.