Friday, May 18, 2012

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Spring 2012

I'm excited to be participating in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I am a first time participant and feel quite honored to be part of such a talented group of quilters.

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. 

16 comments:

Borderline Quilter said...

It's beautiful,guess you really wanted a Christmas quilt but it was so worth the effort!

Best Wishes
Kay in Scotland

Julia Graber said...

Oh, I love your Christmas quilt. You have shown a job well done. The lettering is so cute and I really like it.

Sew Lovins said...

Beautiful! Lovely Christmas quilt. I've never used wool batting. Might have to try it!

Debbie said...

Wonderful pieced words....they do make it special. Just a hint....red fabrics often bleed forever.....try adding table salt ( a hefty few tablespoons to the wash tub) to the water and let it soak for 10 minutes and then rinse. it should help, but always use the dye grabbers.

CitricSugar said...

Lovely quilt. I'm sure it will keep you very warm this Christmas.

Karen said...

I like the border with all the words.

Mom said...

Great holiday quilt~

Hope you visit my blog too,

margaret gunn
www.quiltsoflove.blogspot.com

Batiklover said...

Always love to look at your quilts, you give me such inspiration!!!! I have never tried wool batting...Hmmmmm

Is this a competition you are in? Details pelase..... :-)

straythreads said...

beautiful Christmas quilt and so cozy with a wool batting
Ann

Sarcastic Quilter said...

What a wonderful holiday quilt!

The Thompsons said...

It's beautiful and I particularly love all of the words around the quilt.

Sue Daurio said...

Well the words look like they fit perfectly! And it really makes the quilt. What a wonderful thing that must be to unpack every year. Beautiful!

Quiltbenaco said...

Bella!l'idea delle parole tutte intorno lo rende unico!
Ciao

Nana said...

Charming!

Eileen said...

wonderful Christmas quilt. love the words--need to try something like that. thanks for sharing and have a great day

Ivory Spring said...

That is an amazing quilt.

Thank you for visiting me and leaving the kind comment.