A Christmas Project

I am now working on the fifth of my Christmas projects for this year.  You may remember way back I made a little cathedral window pincushion with festive fabrics, it was really too early to start mentioning Christmas so I called it festive.  Wouldn't this be a lovely gift for a quilting friend for Christmas?

Cathedral Pinushion

I also made two festive table runners (I am counting this as one project as I did them together) with the idea of raffling them for Marie Curie Cancer Care.  They have been given away for this purpose and hopefully will raise some funds and brighten a table somewhere this Christmas season.  You can see them if you have a look in the tab above in My Quilts. 

We had two Christmassy tutorials at class earlier this month. One was a quick and easy coaster which was done in cool blue snowflake fabrics.  It's pieced on the front and has an appliquéd snowflake on the back.  The challenge was to get it done in an hour - yes we managed it!



Cool Blues Coaster

 

The other was a more complicated, rather striking Hunter's Star block.  I struggle with foundation piecing but thanks to a good teacher I managed to produce this.  We certainly didn't manage this in an hour, but the basics were taught in class and we finished it off at home.  It may be transformed into a cushion later.

Striking Star

Every year since I started on my quilting journey I make a quilt to decorate the house for the holiday season.  This year is no exception.  I don't usually start working on or thinking about Christmas and all the trimmings and trappings until after my birthday.  So last week I got the appropriate box of fabric out and had a rummage.  I talked about half square triangles a few blog posts ago and thought this year's design should incorporate them.   

I was unsure how this quilt was going to turn out, however I started cutting 5" squares from my reds, greens and festive fabrics.  I pieced them together with a gold/cream fabric which reminded me of snowballs or raindrops on a window, and low and behold the HSTs began to grow.  100+ blocks later and lots of trimming I was ready to make use of the design wall.  Oh what fun!  After many aborted attempts I finally decided on the design and took a photo.  Then techie came into the room and suggested perhaps it would look better with the opposite colour in the middle - oh oh!  Here we go again, we tried it out together, stood back and decided .....that we didn't like it, glad I took that photo!  It was much better the other way around.  All change again.  However techie has decided that HE would like to have a go making a Christmas quilt??!!!  Watch this space, I don't think he will have time to do it for this year but you never know maybe 2015?

It came down off the wall row by row and it stitched up quickly.  It is almost done now, here is a photo of the binding going on.  

The Binding

I hope you all have a good week hopefully I will have this finished to show you next week.