Candy Cane Christmas Quilt

One last sewing project before Christmas!

I’ve been posting on Pinterest a bunch of holiday quilts.

So many quilts!  So little time! I wanted to make a quilt for ME!  And Maggie.  So we could curl up together and take some nice holiday naps.  Whilst listening to holiday music. And drinking hot cocoa.

And I ended up making a patchwork quilt in red and white since I just happened to have several red and white pieces of fabric already. 

(Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have enough fabric so had to get a little more!)

Like I wanted to base the quilt on a candy cane stripe and I didn’t have any.  

Now here’s a boring little dance on how I bought the fabric.  I do not usually purchase fabric at Jo-anne’s for quilts.  There is some quilting snobbery out there that fabric from big box stores won’t stand up to the test of time. Quilts are made to last forever and be handed down to future generations…. blah, blah, blah, blah.  Could be true, but I couldn’t find a red stripe anywhere else. Even on my internet fabric stores that I frequent. And I had to have a candy cane stripe to make a candy cane quilt!    And since I was there at Jo-anne’s and the fabric was so cheap and I had to wait in line, anyhow, I bought the red with white snowflakes, too.  And my rationalization?  This quilt will only be used for one month a year so how hard can that be on it?  Plus it’s for me–if it falls apart, I’ll know not to buy that type of fabric again! 

The polka dot fabrics are from Moda and I did order them from Fabric.com.  The remaining fabrics were all scraps left over from projects from last year and I bought all that fabric from our Crystal River shop, Tomorrow’s Treasures. 

This was relatively quick and easy.  Especially since I was stuck at home because I was SICK so I had plenty of time to sew and recuperate.  (Probably need to disinfect it from germs.)

Here’s the patches waiting to be sewn together.

I’m still a quilting novice so I’m not going into many details. I believe that the above blocks are called “Nine Patch”. The quilt finishes to about 42″ x 60″ which is a nice “nap size”.  (And Maggie and I like nothing better than a nice nap.)  I got very bored with all the quilting and my sewing machine was making some wheezing noises so I didn’t quilt around each of the little center blocks.  But the outside of the large blocks and the borders are quilted at 1/4″ from the seams.

My favorite part of quilting is definitely the design stage.  I even bought a pad of graph paper and colored pencils and now draw the quilt and color exactly how I want it!  I like to pick out the fabric, too.  So many choices!  Do you think I can just design quilts, buy the fabric, and get someone to do the labor?  For free?  Yeah, I thought not.  So I’ll just have to keep sewing.  I think my machine might need some maintenance first, though

And some obligatory Maggie photos…

I threw the quilt on the couch in the family room after our photo session and Maggie claimed it. (Now you might think that’s the same couch that I took the other pictures on, but not so, I have four sofas in three different rooms that are all the same neutral color.  I keep asking myself “How did that happen?”)

I’m a little burnt out on sewing right now.  So I’m taking a couple of weeks off from my sewing corner.  But I’ll have some kind of DIY project on Thursday.  Could be about Christmas Baking!  I can smell the cookies burning already!