Cozy Christmas Quilt - Finished!

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....

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.

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!

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???

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...

crinkly goodness!

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