Merry Christmas Quilt

Hope everyone had a wonderful and blessed Christmas!!  We did!  All spent with family.  On the 23rd we traveled to my in-laws’ for the night and returned home Christmas Eve night.  My dad and my sister AND of course Sarge made the trip too! 🙂  I feel so fortunate to have such a close, loving family to spend this wonderful time with.

Since it is Christmas, what better time to share “Merry Christmas Quilt” by Heart To Hand.  This version was a BOM pieced and appliqued by Lisa Bongean for Primitive Gatherings available here.  I believe Lisa mentioned that they may run it again as a BOM.  I love this version!!!  I warn you there are 41 photos up ahead!!!  Lots of angles and shots of every block.  The reason…2 photographers…2 perspectives!!  We have a new camera and so we had to “play” with it a bit.  🙂  I have to admit, Scott did a great job.  I will let the photos do most of the “talking.”  Some details first…14 thread changes!!!  All So Fine by Superior.  2 layers of batting…Dream Green with a layer of Hobbs 80/20 in black over it.  ENJOY!

Lots of ruler work in the border.  I did pre-mark the light gray inner border to make sure my diagonal lines were pretty consistent and the number of the came out equal around the quilt.  I detest pre-marking but it was worth the work!!

 I (or Scott did :-)) took photos of each block.

I used lots of different fillers.  I blended the background fillers to just flow continuously into the next block.  Lots of feathers!!!!!  I really wanted the feathers to vine and “grow” throughout the quilt.  All different sizes and shapes of feathers.  No uniformity.  Just like they were growing across the quilt.

Santa is one of my favorite blocks.  His beard looks pretty cool!!

Tired of photos yet??  Good!  Cuz we there are lots more!! LOL!!!  I love to see tons of photos.  Especially when it comes to quilting, so that is why I show so many.  There may be others of you just like me out there. 🙂

 There is a mixture of fillers…some meandering, snowballs…swirls.  Some nice winter weather.

 A nice little feather wreath above the door.  And some smoke coming out of the chimney.  Fun details!

A feather tree.

The last, but not least…

I always receive a few questions inquiring about quilting on wool with the longarm.  I always quilt on the wool applique!!  No issues at all with needles breaking or skipped stitches.  This quilt was very thick in areas.  My advice to just take it slowly.  I was kind of scared of it at first too, but the more I quilt on wool the more I love the look, texture and character it gives the quilt.

 You can see in this photo only one leaf is quilted so far.  There is a huge difference from the non-quilted leaves.  I think it looks so much better with the quilting.

I chose to quilt the borders and outline all the appliques first.  Then once I got to the bottom of the quilt, I worked from the bottom back up quilting the background fill.  To make sure my quilt did not distort in any way, I basted the background, around the appliques if there was space larger than the size of my hand.

You can see my basting stitches in the upper area of the photo.  The background fill is all very random.  I would draw out a winding spine with chalk and then fill.  I just figured it out as I went.  Fingers crossed that it looked good.   When I finally laid the quilt out and saw the whole thing…I was like “wow” turned out okay. 🙂

The back of the quilt was pretty cool too!!

Well, I hope you enjoyed the film!!! LOL!!!  Hope this helps explain my process.  I am not saying its the right way or only way, it is just the way I did it.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from our family to yours!