Tuesday Archives - My Christmas Quilt

I've been enjoying participating in the Tuesday's Archives over at Val's Quilting Studio.  

It's been fun to look back at older quilting projects.  I'm still surprised when I find a project that I've never blogged about.  I feel like I've been blogging forever, (Is that a good thing or a bad thing?) so all my quilts should have showed up somewhere on the blog at some time or another.  However, I'm finding that's not the case.  

This week's archive topics are Chevrons and Christmas Quilts.  I've yet to make a Chevron quilt, though I've seen a few that have sparked my interest.  There are a couple of Christmas quilts in the portfolio, the first of which I kept for me.  

The pattern is How Charming by Anne Dease for Quilt in a Day.  The local quilt shop was going to offer a whole day class to make this quilt.  But not enough people signed up for the class.  I'd already selected the fabrics and was already to go when the class didn't make.  So I just had my own solo class.  The quilting is a simple meander with green thread done by Lesa Foreman.  Lesa used to own a small quilt shop not far from me, but due to family circumstances she needed a more traditional job with benefits, so she had to let the shop go.    

I didn't start out intending to make a Christmas quilt, several other fabric selections were considered before deciding to make use of some Christmas fat quarters that were sitting in the stash and pair those with one of the cardinal fabrics I was hoarding.  The green and red paisley border was one of those fabrics I didn't really want to cut, but it works so well with the rest of the quilt.  

  

This was the first quilt where I ended up working with diamonds. The cardinals needed to be cut on the bias in order to get them to sit right in the blocks.  That's when I learned you are supposed to starch the fabric before you cut the pieces.  There were a few problems getting the blocks to lay flat at first.   I finally ended up cutting the red framing strips a bit wider than specified and trimmed the cardinal blocks to size afterwards.  

This quilt was finished in August of 2010.  I didn't start blogging until September of that year.  Another thing that became obvious as this post came together is that my quilt photography skills have improved a bit (or maybe it's that I take more pictures now).  

For more on Chevrons and Christmas quilts, check out all the posts over at Val's Quilting Studio.