7 Days of New Year's - Day 5: Finally Back To the Quilting!

After days of focusing on cross stitch, it feels good to finally get back to quilting!  In yesterday's post, I mentioned that at one point my cross stitch work got held up by work on three late Christmas quilting projects.  Two of those weren't finished, one of which was the "Letters To Santa" quilt that despite an early "Christmas in July" start, only got as far as having the borders finally added...

....and the backing made up.

I should also note here that the companion "Letters To Santa" cross stitch while further along than it was in the Summer....

Stitching done from the Summer until now....

...was bumped to work on the piece for my MIL that I talked about finishing in the last post.  I should note that my MIL's gift will be on its way to her the day after New Year's because I now need to bake up a fresh batch of the peanut butter cookies I usually send her.  My husband works for UPS and said if I mailed the ones I had baked last week today, they might wind up sitting and not get delivered until after New Year's anyway.  So I'll make a fresh batch on New Year's Day and in the meantime we don't mind munching on the ones from the batch on hand!

The second project was a new one that I actually made up surprisingly quick after realizing I needed another display quilt in what was supposed to have been this year's Red/Green/Black/Gold color scheme.  That happened because I saw this tutorial in with my Christmas stash.  I found it as I re-organized that stash into a new storage container when I set up to resume work on the "Letters To Santa" top:

Another great storage bin, this one is from Michael's.

It was easily strip pieced using a bunch of busy fabrics pulled from the stash:

The good news is that the backing for this is also already made and the binding cut.  So now it and the "Letters To Santa" quilt sit awaiting quilting in 2025.

So the one thing I did mange to finish in the lead up to Christmas was my Red & Green version of the Temecula Quilt Company's "12 Days of Christmas" mini quilt.  

This design was offered as a quilt along all the way back in 2011 and I had made up tops in three different colorways back in 2020:

In 2022,  I finished the Red & White version (on the right) for holiday decorating that year.  This year since the Red & Green version (on the left) fit my intended color scheme, I layered and quilted it and it went up on display (along with two other older quilts) in time for Christmas as you see in the first picture above.  

To get it done meant I had to quickly decide on a quilting scheme for it.  I had forgotten how simply I had quilted the Red & White one:  for that one I had just outlined the blocks, cross-hatched the side borders and stitched straight lines across the top and bottom borders.  

Reviewing that made it easy to decide to quilt this one even simpler:  For it, I outlined the blocks and just straight line stitched around all the borders, following the path of the side border stripes and the lines of words in the top and bottom borders.  

When that got done in far less time than I expected,  I decided to also finish up the last Blue & White one during one of the "7 Days" sessions which was the task for today.  So like for the Red & Green, I spray basted the layering and then planned the quilting.  

For the quilting I again outlined the blocks.  Sewing the sashing was easier than for the Red & Green since like the Red & White version, this one employs sashing squares so it was easy to stitch straight up and down the sides of the sashing columns and then across the sashing rows.  For the borders I went even easier than the prior two:  I just free-motioned the borders with loops and swirls.  

Done!  The binding had been picked out when the top was made back in 2020.  As I did for the Red & Green, I used Edyta Sitar's "Faux Double Fold" binding method that uses 1-3/4" cut strips.  The binding strips were attached to the front with the corners mitered in the traditional manner, folded to the back (see Edyta's method in her video for that) and then machine stitched in the ditch from the front to secure the folded edge on the back. 

So that's another project completed for the "7 Days" sessions!  When I checked my email today I had received a notice that Kari Shell was running one of her free EQ8 workshops for a Winter mini wall hanging.  I signed up for the evening session for today although there is another session scheduled for tomorrow if you are interested.  So with this quilt done,  I checked that out as the last thing (before posting this) for today!