Quilts of Christmases Past

I don’t think I have ever written about the Christmasy quilts that I made before Amanda and I started this blog, but she mentioned one of them in the Holiday quilts post, so I thought, why not write about those quilts? There are 3!

First one is the triangle quilt that I made with this lovely Robert Kaufmann Nature’s Window winter fabric collection, using a free pattern from See Kate Sew. If I could go back in time, I would cut bigger triangles so that more of the print would be visible.

Once I got the layout just right, a perfect ombré in my mind, I sewed together the triangle rows and then added a grey border.

Amanda told me about this cool paper sticker thing that I could put over the border to use as a guide to quilt a design. It was so easy to make the border quilting look fancy, but I think I might be able to do something similar using a Hera marker. Something to try in the future!

I bought this fabric in May of 2020 (which was very cold! note the fire in the fabric picture) and managed to finish the quilt before Christmas, a feat that I did not accomplish this year.

I actually bought fabric from two RK collections, but I ended up making the Winter White Solstice by Lynnea Washburn into a separate quilt for my mom. She loves chickadees, and I knew she’d love these prints.

I wanted to do a kind of scrappy star block sampler quilt. This was a big step up for me, my first time making anything more complicated than squares or triangles. I learned about flying geese, HSTs, QSTs… I relied on tutorials from the Seasoned Homemaker, Amy Smart, and a bunch of other random sites on the internet to figure these things out.

The back was pieced together in a rather insane way. I was originally going to use some of the panel that I’d cut up as blocks for the front of the quilt, but that didn’t look quite right when I laid it out, so I made more star blocks.

I sewed the binding on this one in the car while we were driving to Michigan in August 2020, and I finished it as we were turning onto my parents’ street. My mom was impressed, and she cried when I gave it to her in the driveway, since it was on my lap when I got out and she greeted us. Oh, mom! You know how to receive a quilt.

After that, I decided to make a Christmas quilt for my sister. I picked out a bunch of Christmas fabric collections and asked her to pick the ones she liked. I ordered a fat quarter bundle of this lovely Moda fabric, Forest Frost Glitter, and found a pattern in a book that I borrowed from Amanda with the hopes of using it to learn FPP. I did not learn FPP but I did make a traditionally pieced quilt.

If I could go back in time, I would do something a bit different with the background fabric. That light blue square near the top right corner, blah, the squares. I’d cut those up and crazy quilt them together, or make them look more like the sky in Amanda’s cat quilt. But… this was the 5th quilt I ever made, so I’m cutting myself some slack.

I also attempted some FMQ on this quilt, which I inspected at Thanksgiving of this year, about one year after giving this to my sister, and wow. It’s not pretty. But I used wool batting and it’s soft and snuggly and she doesn’t care (or… she doesn’t tell me that it’s terrible) because she’s a really good sister.

I’m still hoping for some snowy weather for the background of photos of my quilts of Christmas present (it’s still Christmas until epiphany, right?). Hopefully soon! The constant Pittsburgh winter grey rain has been depressing, and not ideal for Christmas quilt glamour shots.

UPDATE!!

My family in Michigan got a ton of snow and they took their Christmas quilts out into the elements for a proper photoshoot. Much better!!

Thank you to my family for taking your quilts on a field trip.