Two Christmas Quilts

I am sure you remember me saying I had two Christmas quilts on the frame. Well I have finally had time to upload my photographs so I can share them just in time for Christmas.

The first one I felt was the easier one. If nothing else it told me what it wanted, but it also has larger pieces which I often find easier to quilt. The star blocks are all quilted with a continuous curve. I kept all the stitching on the background of the star so they pop up. I wanted the stars themselves to come forward as much as I could.

The Santas are all quilted in the same way, but not the same. Each is outlined and then the back ground filled in with feathers and pebbles. The pebbles take a while to do, but I like the effect that the figures have something to stand on. The background of the figures are pieced, in a churn dash pattern. This gave me a good starting point, and I only quilted some parts of the block, hopefully making the block clearer.

The second of the Christmas quilts was O'Tanenbaum. I've been looking at this quilt hanging on the wall at the shop for a while and I've often wondered how you would quilt it. Well it finally became more than an academic question. This quilt has come closer to stumping me than any I've had before. I was torn between doing some sort of all over and not doing anything that would take away from the huge amount of work that went into piecing it.

Working with the piecing won out. OK no surprise there. The problem was then trying to do it quickly. I didn't want this to take too long and get too expensive. I decided that the houses needed a lot of attention, mostly because I couldn't think of a quick and sympathetic way to quilt the half timbered house. Each house I quilted in a way that added detail to the building, so roofs got tiles and walls got bricks. To make the applique flowers and tree pop up I needed some pretty dense quilting. As I don't often stipple I went for that in those areas. It is a good pattern for holding down an area.

The stars have the same continuous lines that I used on the first quilt. It works, and I guess I had it on the brain at the time. This just left the log cabins. I would normally like to quilt along the logs, but in this quilt they are only 1/2" wide. I also wanted to add some more flow to the quilt, to draw you around the big star. To do that I've put feathers into each of the triangles in log cabins. As the thread is quite a close match to the fabric it doesn't fight with the piecing, but when light falls across the quilt the texture does flow.

So there you go, two quilts just for Christmas.