Holiday Quilt

Are you ready for Christmas?  Target is, so I decided that was the most logical place to take a picture of my most recent quilt finish!  I went in right at 7am and one of the employees was nice enough to take this for me.  I'm calling this quilt Holiday as a nod to the fact that the front is made entirely of Alison Glass' Holiday line.

I also took some pictures outside with a pine tree, but I think the Target ones adds the bling that was missing from this one - I'm not quite ready to put up the decorations at my own house yet!  This quilt is my version of the Ultimate Beginner Quilt-Along hosted by the Fat Quarter Shop.

I made up my own setting for it - the "holly balls" in the center just break up the green a little bit since I'm not a huge fan of borders.  It may look complicated, but it was pretty easy - cut two strips of your background fabric that are 1.75" wide and one strip of the contrast color that is 1.5" wide.  Sew the strips together in the order background --> contrast --> background.  Then cut the strip into three pieces that are 13" long - I like to leave a little extra and trim it off after I've sewn it to the blocks.  You'll need to do that 4 times.  Then cut four 4" squares - these make up the spaces in the corners around the center block.  After that, assembly is the same as the original pattern states.  My outside border is 3.5" wide.  Using the same contrast color for the binding ties the whole thing together!

For the back, I decided to feature two fat quarters that I've had forever but couldn't bear to cut up.  Sticking them in the middle of a quilt back fixes that problem!  To finish the stacked keys design, I used two other pieces leftover from other quilting projects.  The main fabric is a cute Winter Tales fabric.

If you look closely, you can see that I abandoned my original plan to do an all-over quilting pattern - those big spaces were just begging me to have a little fun.  I kept it simple and only used a few colors of thread and a lot of orange peels and loops.  The background quilting is quite dense so the blocks pop out a little bit.

And now my son wants to bake Christmas cookies, so I guess we are just fully embracing Christmas in November around here.  Thanks for stopping by!