Ready for Christmas In July!

A finished Christmas quilt!  I've been spending a lot of time this year finishing up my quilt-along quilts from 2016 and when I came across this stack of Christmas tree blocks I decided they needed to get done as well! I made these in October 2015 from the book Winter Wonderland by Sherri Falls.  I had also already made the car, an adaptation of a block from the Snapshots quilt-along that Greg Jones of Grey Dogwood Studio came up with.  With all the harder pieces done, it seemed silly to let it sit any longer so I got to work.

This quilt is a scrap-buster; all of the trees and churn dashes are various fabrics from my stash.  Speaking of churn-dashes, these are an improvisation: the pattern called for four-patches but I couldn't find a fabric I liked in my stash to contrast with the red.  Luckily 2015 me way over-bought the background fabric so I was able to adapt the pattern without running out of fabric.  The tree trunks all match and are from a single piece of stashed brown fabric.

Fun story, I started off by laying out the trees in the order they came off the stack they were in.  I looked at them laying on the floor and decided that they came off the pile pretty balanced and didn't bother to rearrange them at all.  I don't think I consciously put them in any sort of order when I finished them so it was just a happy surprise.

I finished piecing this the day of my quilt guild meeting in June and we had a speaker that night who talked about quilting like the quilt commanded.  So I decided to try that with this quilt.  First, I quilted all the green car squares with a neon green meander to form a foundation for the rest of the quilt.  Next, I went through and did all the red churn dashes.  I had two shades of red thread and just used whichever one felt right.  I didn't worry if I used some motifs multiple times and some only once - I just looked at each fabric and did what felt right.  The trees were quilted similarly - all the trunks were done with wavy brown lines, but the tops were done with one of two shades of green in whatever motif I felt the tree fabric called for.

I finished it off with spirals in the background - one of my favorite motifs.  The backing is a single fabric, purchased from the clearance section of a local quilt store before I even got the book in the mail.  I saw it and knew it was perfect for this quilt!  The binding is from my stash.

And there you have it - one Christmas quilt finished six months before Christmas!