I'm Making a Christmas Quilt!

Last autumn I bought some lovely festive fabric to make a quilt for my sister. She loves Christmas and all things cosy, so I thought a Christmas-themed quilt for her sofa would be a nice gift.

 

I washed the fabric, ironed it, cut it into squares, planned my layout and started sewing.

I'd initially intended to blog about the project as I went along but I decided that I'd rather keep it a secret to make it a special surprise... so I just posted a photo of all the leftover scraps instead (what a tease!)

Here are a couple of terrible photos of the planned layout:

It took a while to get a good balance of all the prints, but I got there in the end!

Hand stitching these squares together turned out to be the perfect project for me last winter. After lots of work deadlines, it was great to put my feet up and relax with some simple, repetetive stitching. I spent many happy hours sewing while watching cheesy made-for-TV Christmas movies - the perfect accompaniment to a festive sewing project.

Of course, hand stitching a quilt takes a lot of time and I (sadly) couldn't spend all my time sitting on the sofa sewing... so I pushed my deadline back to Christmas 2015. I neglected the project a bit for a few months, then picked it back up this summer. Here's how it was looking when I had about six rows totally stitched with six more still to add:

These are dreadful photos, but you can hopefully get a good idea of how the quilt is looking. I just have two more rows of squares to add now, then I can start the actual quilting.

But why am I blogging about this quilt if it's A) a secret and B) not yet finished?

Well, unfortunately it's not a secret any more! I totally forgot to put the quilt out of sight when my sister came to visit last week and while we were chatting in my office she said "oooh... what's that?" and picked it up and lo, the quilty cat was out of the proverbial bag. Oops.

Luckily she likes it! (Phew!) She might not have had the fun surprise of opening a big squishy mystery parcel on Christmas day, but now she can have it to look forward to and I've got a fixed deadline to make sure I get it finished for this Christmas.

Plus: one great thing about it no longer being a secret quilt? I can blog about it! Hurrah! Expect to see lots of quilty progress pics popping up over the coming weeks :)