Christmas Surprise
Topic: Quilting
With the best of intentions I selected an assortment of Christmas fabrics and cut 5-inch squares to follow a tutorial from Missouri Star Quilt Comapny.
I went off the rails on the very first step! We were supposed to construct a 9-patch like this (the colored patches are all different though):
Instead, I made ALL my 9-patches like this:
You gotta understand that the blocks are a variety of colors. On mine, though, the centers are all the same (I'll show you later why).
Then the instructions showed to slice the 9-patch blocks like this and swap the cut-off sides to antoher block:
I realized that with my four white corners, the swapping out of the cut-off sides would bring back more white corners. Shoot!
So I sliced mine all ther way to the sides in both directions like this:
When the tutorial swaps out the cut-off sides with another block they get this:
Mine was NOT going to work that way so I swapped out those white corners for 2 1/2 inch colored squares (using all the same ones) and then added 1/2 inch sashing between all the elements. Mine looks like this:
AWESOME!
Put 12 of their blocks together and you get this:
Here's a picture from the tutorial:
I decided mine needed 2 inch sashings and cornerstones so the layout became like this:
And here is the final result:
So, here's why I used the same center block in all the 9-patches. I had this adorable chickadee fabric:
Here's the block:
Beautiful gold metallic sashing with block corners and red cornerstones:
As I was working on the blocks I had every intention of finishing this off with cheery prairie points around the edges. But I put in that shiny gold sashing and it threw a little tantrum and declared itself much too sophisticated for those country-style trimmings.
So I added a gold over-printed red backing (it is of the same line as the featured chickadees).
Then I used the green holly from the block corners for the binding.
I call this quilt Christmas Surprise because it surprised me from the very first step where I went wrong.
I'll be keeping this one for myself.
Ddd
Posted by studio3d@ccgmail.net
at 8:19 PM PST