Blogger's Quilt Festival: Deck the Halls

Welcome, visitors from the Blogger's Quilt Festival!  And of course, welcome to all my regular readers!  You all are the best.  :)

It's finally time to share my finished "Deck the Halls" quilt!  Yay!  I had the top finished almost in time for Christmas last year, and now the whole thing is finished with plenty of time to be used all season long this year.  ;)  You all know how these things go, right?

So here is the story of this quilt.  Way back in November of last year, I won a gift card giveaway - one of the best kinds!  I decided it was high time to make something wholly for ME.  I had Christmas on the brain, so I ordered myself these adorable Christmas fabrics!  Everybody needs a Christmas quilt, right?  I thought so too.  I'd also had my eye on the Fat Quarter Shop's free "Deckade the Halls" quilt-along and on a whim decided to jump on board (check out the Flickr group HERE).  It was so much fun and I love how my quilt turned out!

Fabrics from left to right:  1-4 Kate Spain's "In from the Cold," 5-7 Josephine Kimberling's "Hip Holiday", 8-9 Nancy Halverson's "Ho Ho Ho."

And then something awesome happened.  My husband got assigned to go to a two day weekend workshop in Las Vegas and his boss agreed to let me come with him!  I don't know about you, but sometimes a break from real life (and kids, mostly kids - even though I love them to death) is JUST what we need.  So while the hubby spent his daytime hours at his workshop, I holed up in the hotel room with the laptop and the iPad and SEWED.  It was so awesome!  I got tons of stuff done.  :)

Anyway.  I managed to finish the entire quilt top by New Year's Eve.  And then I decided it was okay to table this quilt for awhile.  Well, a few weeks ago I pulled it out, made a back and quilted it.

For the back, I originally planned to use a flannel sheet I had picked up at a yard sale, but in the end I didn't love it enough to force myself to use it.  So I decided to piece together all of my leftovers from the quilt top (plus a larger cut I picked up after the top was finished).  With the help of some of my IG friends, I ended up arranging the randomly pieced blocks to looks like presents.  

 For the quilting, I first stitched in the ditch around every. single. block using a clear thread.  I wanted my blocks to pop and intended to do some tight free motion quilting in the background.  But when I asked the hubby for advice, I found out that he pretty much hates pebbles, swirls, stippling - anything that is not straight lines.  He insisted that I should quilt diagonal lines.  And even though it was WAY more work than simple FMQ would have been, I did.  I like that the crosshatching is nice and subtle, which is kind of what I was going for.

Here are a few close ups:

It felt a little weird photographing a Christmas quilt on the fall leaves, but you've got to admit that they make a gorgeous background, don't you?

The binding was also pieced together using two of the leftover fabrics.  Machine attached, hand finished.

I am entering this quilt into the Large Quilts category of Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Go check out the rest of the quilts here:

Quilt stats:

Started: November 2013

Finished: October 5, 2014

Fabrics:  Kate Spain's "In from the Cold,"  Josephine Kimberling's "Hip Holiday,"  Nancy Halverson's "Ho Ho Ho."  Background fabrics were yard sale finds/given to me by friends.

Batting:  Various scraps given to me by a friend and stitched together - I think they were Cotton/Poly 80/20

Finished size: 59" x 68" (3 inch shrinkage after washing)

Recipient:  ME!

Methods used:  Piecing, Straight Line Quilting (on my home machine)

Binding:  Machine stitched to front, hand stitched to back

All previous progress posts for this quilt can be found HERE.

Also, this was goal #1 on my Quarter 4 Finish Along list.  So, come January I'll be linking up here: