Homespun Christmas, 45” x 54”
This might be an odd time to be posting about Christmas quilts, but the truth is if I work on a Christmas quilt in the late fall and into December it never gets done because that time of the year is too busy for me. So, this January I decided to use up scraps and get some Christmas quilts made while I had a totally free schedule. January and February are some of my favorite months in the studio. I don’t feel guilty for sewing when it’s cold and possibly snowy outside. I also don’t have a lot of other deadline work to do then. I often make community quilts in the winter and I did that too, but I did manage to finish two of the Christmas quilts that I’ll show here.
The first is Homespun Christmas. I found a stack of partially completed blocks in one of my bins. They were mostly created with stripe and plaid homespun fabrics and I added some other fabrics from the stash to round it out. These blocks were created in a liberated log cabin style. For each block I started with a square of some sort. Some were single small squares of fabric, but sometimes I made a half square triangle block, an hourglass block, a four patch, or even a mishmash of little pieces stuck together without much of a plan. I also got lazy and did a few large center squares.
Once the middles were ready I just added around and around with “logs”, following no particular color scheme until the blocks were at least 9.5 inches square. Then I was able to trim them down with my 9.5 inch square ruler. This ruler is my absolute favorite for quick block making. I can make a sewn panel of fabric into an easy to use block with this size ruler. This makes improv or liberated piecing especially easy because each block sews perfectly to its neighbors. When I go full improv it requires just that much more thinking and planning to make everything fit. When they are cut to the same size it’s pretty mindless sewing. In that case I will then treat each individual block as a composition and only worry about placement once all the blocks are made and I can shift them around.
I decided to hand quilt this one. I did an X in each center block, then a line down the middle of each log. I don’t mark the quilt top for quilting. In this case it’s easy to do a freehand line and it makes it really mindless stitching, great for TV watching.
This quilt was a lot of fun to make and would be great in any color scheme. I love it for dealing with scraps too because it easy to incorporate triangles, squares and strips. Next time I’ll show you another scrappy Christmas quilt with more of a plan.
