A New Post for the Tuesday Archives

Val over at Val's Quilting Studio hosts a weekly Tuesday Archive Linky Party.

She announces that week's two themes and people can link up an old post about projects they have done for one or both themes.  Quilters can also link up a new post for a "pre-blogging" project about the themes.  I've linked up a few old posts posts in the past month but this week's subject was one that I had a project for but didn't have a detailed post for.  So now I will!

This week's themes are "Chevron and Christmas Quilts".  I haven't made a chevron quilt yet but I have made a Christmas quilt.  Actually, I have made two but the second one was more of a quilt made from Christmas-style fabrics and can be seen here.  The one I want to highlight today is one made pre-blogging.  It was mentioned briefly as part of an early post but no real details were provided there.  Since it may be a while before I make another Christmas quilt, I figured I'd shake this one out and give it an airing!

 My Christmas quilt is "A Christmas Wish For A Happy Holiday" made in 2008:

I apologize for the not so hot picture, it's rainy today and this quilt has been folded up since after Xmas 2012 because the only place I can display it was occupied this past Christmas.  This project was a free Block Of the Month offered by Debbie Mumm -- one of the early icons of the quilt industry -- on her website that year and is still available in her Free Pattern Archives here.    

As quilters we are often drawn to the concept of the BOM.  It always seems so simple:  you get a pattern and possibly fabrics to make one block each month and then at the end of the year you have a quilt.   I say it "seems" simple because even from the beginning, I've yet to do a BOM this way!  This was the first Block of the Month I ever did.  Debbie put out the patterns each month and I dutifully picked them up and saved them on my computer, swearing I would make them each month.  But I wound up not even starting this project until October!  So instead of making a block a month, I had to make two blocks a week in order to have them ready when the last (the big center) block and quilt assembly instructions came out at the beginning of December and had to hope I would be able to keep up the steady work on the quilt so I could display it for the holidays.

Despite that it was fun.  The best part was that I was able to make all the blocks from the stash I had at the time and I took all the color cues from Debbie's pattern.  In fact the border fabric was one of the first prints I bought when I started quilting in 2002.  I only had three fat quarters of it (all they had on display at the store at the time) and was lucky that it was almost enough to make the border and binding for this quilt (although I had to piece another fabric into the binding to complete it).  One of the block fabrics used was even from my old clothing sewing days!

I admit it's not too heavily quilted, just stitched in the ditch around the blocks.  Back then I was still pretty nervous about quilting my projects even though I had set out from the beginning to be a machine quilter.  I was so nervous that I didn't finish up the quilting of it until Christmas Eve!  But there is another reason it's not too heavily quilted and that would be the back label:

This label is centered in the back under the center block.  I've always liked the idea of including a "fun" label in every project if I can.  I had collected Christmas quilt ideas for a long time before I saw Debbie's BOM project.  One of them was this pieced picture from the December 1997 (#298) issue of Quilter's Newsletter magazine.  It's called "Partridge & Pears" and was designed by Deborah Moffett-Hall.  It was designed to be a stand alone wall hanging to finish at 29" x 18-1/2" using squares that finish to 1-1/2".  I liked it but not having anywhere to display a quilt that size,  I thought it could instead make a cute label for the BOM quilt (which finishes at 47" square) if I made it smaller.  So I made my squares to finish at 1" so the pieced portion wound up at an unfnished 14-1/4 x 7-1/2" before adding the lower label area and the border around it.  And yes I did hang it up for Christmas Day that year!

I did go back in 2009 and add some more stitching in the borders using a very light gold metallic thread.  A little more confident in my free-motion skills at that point, I stitched a holly and berries motif in the corners and the quilt title in the top and bottom borders.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get a good shot of that but know that it's there!  I still want to "fill quilt" the blocks of  this one day but for now, I like to look at it and remember the green horn quilter I was back then!

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to go back and check out the other Archive links over at Val's!