Wrapping up the Giveaway and A Few Christmas-Look Quilts

The Giveaway for free Autumnal Tulip applique templates is now over and I'm totally caught up! Can you believe that I sent out 86 pdf's in all? Crazy. Definitely underestimated the lure of free applique templates! For those of you who requested a pdf and did not receive one, please email me directly. 

Quarter Triangles for the finish!

Quarter Triangles ended up being the very last finish of the year. I started the quilt with the idea of using up old tired green fabrics sometime last winter.

Loving this backing fabric

Then I found the Christmassy floral languishing in the bottom of a tote and decided the entire thing would be a marvelous Christmas-look throw! I'm never in the mood to work on Christmas quilts until the season so I'm always putting ideas off. Maybe later. And then later usually never comes....

Easy peasy throw quilt

It's not super exciting, but this one makes me happy. The hand quilting went very fast and the binding was found in yet more of those tired old green fabrics. Can't argue with that! I had a little bit of fabric bleed with the reds {I thought they had been properly presoaked!}, but they mostly rinsed out.

This one's mostly about the fabric...

Next up in the hoop is this funky looking quilt that I made based on a U & U quilt. I took the simple, utilitarian look quilt and multiplied the base of the quilt times four. Then I inserted my color palette along with the floral vibe and made it mine.

Love the not-so-perfect circles

I'm not exactly thrilled with the overall look of the quilt, but I do so love the soft, floral vibe to the end product. Having it in my lap for hand quilting just makes my heart melt and I'm charmed that these difficult florals finally found a good home. It's a quirky home, but it still looks and feels right.

And the applique ends up being icing on the cake!

And you'll be shocked and appalled, but I just had to add just a teensy bit of applique after all. The quilt was totally sandwiched and pinned {of course!} when I made the decision to go ahead. Why oh why does that happen to me? Such a difficult time to start adding on applique pieces to a quilt, but now I'm even happier with the quilt. Much, much happier. I guess it was meant to be!

Another Christmas quilt in the works

And then there's this quilt that has finally progressed enough to actually mention it here on the blog. It's another one that I cut out last December in the hopes that it would end up being another Christmas-look quilt. I've been piddling around with it off and on all during the month of December, but it's been very slow go. All the fabric is oldy moldy stuff that somehow ends up looking perfectly fine in this holiday themed quilt. Right? This particular quilt block has been on my bucket list for probably well over 15 years and I thought, why not? 

My seams are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination so I will probably end up sewing the blocks together with a very thin sashing. In my mind I'm thinking a plaid would be good, but we'll have to see what's hanging out in the stash totes. Not planning on spending any extra money on this one. Nine blocks are done out of sixteen! Might actually have a another quilt top done before the years end....