Whew! Finally finished this one! This lovely quilt is for my cousin Leah, and her husband Franklin, as a wedding gift. According to the Post Office, they should receive this today. When we found out about her upcoming wedding (last summer), I decided to make a quilt that they could snuggle under as their wedding present. Since their wedding was in October (what a nice month to get married!), I decided to make a Christmas quilt. I had ordered some Christmas fabrics that I liked (you know, on clearance, end of the bolt prices), plus received some great coordinating pieces in a Mystery Bundle. A purchase of gray solid sealed the deal!
I started cutting in August...
Did some chain piecing in September, and did a lot of sewing on the wedding day in October...
I had the quilt put together (for the most part) by the end of October....
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| do you like my design wall? |
And then I hit a wall. I stopped working full-time (voluntarily) the end of October. And I think that I was stopping myself from quilting because the house wasn't clean enough. Like, I hadn't done a good enough job on housework that I didn't deserve to quilt. Self-flagellation, party of one...
Not only that, this quilt is huge (by my standards) and I knew that it would just piss me off when I tried to quilt it on my little bitty beginner machine with the itty bitty throat. So I considered hand tying it with yarn. When I asking my coworker what she thought of hand-tied quilts (because I don't care for them and I wanted a quilter to tell me it was okay), so said no, but that she had just ordered a long-arm and that I could quilt it on her machine!!!!
Oh, happy day!!! The beginning of January, seriously, like on the 1st of January, I finished up the final 3 seams to finish the quilt top, made the backing, and then latter in January set off to Audrey's to quilt it up.
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| Hi Audrey! You're the best! |
Audrey says she's still learning her machine, but she still taught me a lot. Neither of us are artists with the panto-graph, but it turned out just fine. The entire time we were there, my whole body was just buzzing! Like the electricity was in me! I told Audrey and her husband that there was no way my husband would like them now, because I'd be going home and telling him that now I need a long-arm!
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| first pass on the long-arm |
But, alas, I have neither the money nor the space for a long arm. Perhaps in another life...
And since I'm slow as molasses, it took me until February to make the binding and bind the quilt. What's with my slowness???
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Foxes are super cute, but not one of the Christmas fabrics!
They just went so well with the other fabrics, I had to use it! |
By the time it was bound and washed, we'd had a Chinook blow through and melt all the snow off the trees... I held out for about a week, hoping for snow to pretty up the joint, but it didn't happen...
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| crinkly goodness! |
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| I LOVE the backing fabric!!! |
So I finally got Jeff and the camera and the quilt and we headed outside.
I'm so happy to have made this quilt, and the finish makes me so proud!
And as I sit here writing this, I see the hoarfrost all over the trees, with a light snowfall coming down, creating beautiful winter white trees... Time to photograph another quilt!
Cozy Christmas Quilt is my first finish of 2017.
Also, it's the first quilt for which I used the QuiltCut2, the design wall, and Audrey's long-arm sewing machine. Quite the quilt of firsts!
Linking up to:
Main Crush Monday
Love Laugh Quilt
Sew Fresh Quilts
Freemotion By The River
My Quilt Infatuation
Fabric Frenzy Friday
