My entry is my Christmas quilt from last year. This is my second full sized Christmas quilt. My first one, had a very unfortunate accident with the red flannel backing bleeding despite having been prewashed multiple times. It bled so bad and my efforts to remove the bleeding literally destroyed the quilt.
So, here is the new quilt. It is a medallion quilt. The center portion, is from American Patchwork & Quilting magazine. But, I wanted to make it queen sized and I wanted to try Tonya's free-pieced letters. So the last two borders are my addition. This quilt is 96" and heavy. I used flannel for the backing and the heaviest weight cotton batting from Quilter's Dream -- next time I will stick with wool, my favorite batting.
I started the center portion of the medallion with some of my leftover Dalmatian puppies Christmas fabric. I had used this in a Christmas tree skirt a few years ago. What you can't really see is that the white on white fabric also has little dog bones. If there is a fabric with Dalmatians on it, you can bet it's in my stash. I also have an inordinate amount of polka dotted fabric too.....hhmmmmm......
For the free pieced border words, I tried to used appropriate fabric. If you enlarge the pictures, you can see I used holly fabric, candy cane fabric, snowflakes etc. The packages between the words were also free pieced and acted as good filler.
The most difficult part of this quilt was putting the borders together after all the words were made. Since the words were all different lengths, trying to get them to fit the sides of the quilt was quite a challenge. I quilted this on my HandiQuilter with a holly pantograph. And, because of difficulties with my thumb which no longer allow me to do hand binding, the binding is machine stitched.
Thank you for giving me the chance to share this with all of you.
