Christmas Quilt

Five or six years ago I ventured into pieced quilting for the first time. I had done a couple simple quilts before, but my mom always did the hard parts. I was on my own this time. Facing something new, I did what I always do--I checked out a gazillion books from the library and started looking through them. That's how I came across the snowman pattern above. I loved it. I didn't stop to think about how much work it would be or what a nightmare all that applique work was. I jumped right in and went out to buy my fabric. It's been quite a while since I put this quilt together. I pull it out every Christmas and love it, but somewhere along the line I forgot how awful that applique work was. I remembered as I was putting together my most recent Christmas quilt that I just finished up.

I got a great idea from several quilting blogs to have a "design wall" (AKA- the cheapest IKEA sheet I could find that I attached to my wall and pinned fabric to as I designed my quilt). It's a great way to keep everything in order as you are working on a quilt.

The following pictures show my design process for my quilt that I have been working on the past few weeks.

Arranging the fabric in the order I want. (Remember how crowded I am for space? Pixel's kennel seriously cramps my design wall options.)


The fabric is cut and ready to go. This is the order I decided on.

Slowly adding the pieces I will later applique.
All my pieces are now cut and ready to press onto the individual panels.
All pieces are now sewed on. Ready to sew the panels together and add borders.

Finished!

For the back I added three wonky stars because I love having something to make the back look like more than just an afterthought. I really struggled with how to quilt this considering all the different colors of the quilt and the fact that I was using a mostly solid brown back. I finally decided to quilt it in the color of the front panel. I also decided not to quilt over the applique pieces. It makes the back look a bit funky with the white, blue, green, red and brown thread, but I love the way it turned out on the front.
Here is the link to the designer for the pattern I used:
Holiday Lineup
My quilt is almost the same as hers. I used a few different fabrics for various panels.

Little D's Dino Quilt

I finished Little D's dinosaur quilt yesterday. I really had fun doing it. I decided to lay it out with the four 12 in center squares because I wanted to emphasize the great prints. I love the fabrics. The blue inside border and backing is a soft fuzzy material (not minky, but close).

I had intentions of sewing the binding by hand on this quilt. It sat on my sewing table for almost a week waiting to be bound. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I was dreading it in fact. Finally, yesterday I picked it up and started. After 10 minutes I had only finished a small amount and gave up. I pulled out my stitches and finished it on my machine in 15 minutes. It was definitely worth the time saver and will probably hold up better in the long run, especially since this will belong to a little boy.