Another wedding and another Christmas quilt!

We had another wedding this weekend. (I have lots of cousins who have been doing the marrying thing lately. Silly kids.) This couple has been painting my late grandma's old place, which is right next door to my aunt, and they are going to live there. They painted the upstairs bathroom lime green!! I LOVE it! So I knew I could make them a really bright quilt- and here it is! I basically just wrapped a jelly roll around a charm pack of Merry and Bright, then used the last of the strips and a thrifted sheet for the floating blocks border. It turned out so cute that I wanted to keep it.

I even used one of the Bernie's fancy quilting stitches for the first time!

The theme of the gift was a "Tradition in a Box".

I wrote some little poems and attached them to each item. There are a couple of bowls for candy and popcorn, a DVD copy of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (the REAL one, not the Jim Carrey one) and a photo album so that they can take a picture of their family in front of their Christmas tree every year. (If anyone is interested in doing this and wants a copy of the poems, just email me or leave a comment and I will send you a copy.)

The wedding was last night and I was still up at 4 am yesterday morning hand sewing the binding! Nothing like leaving it to the last minute, right? The gal at the local quilt store laughed at me when I went to pick up some basting spray at 5:00 the night before the wedding- she was the same one who sold me the binding that I sewed on in the car on the way to the last wedding!

So I have now quilted TWO quilts with my new Bernina, and I love it more and more every time I use it. I actually enjoyed quilting this quilt, which is saying a LOT.

Finish for Friday

You're gonna want to grab a chair- I finished a quilt. As in, I actually quilted it!! This is because... dun! dun! dun! I got a new Bernina 430 and I really really love it and I can even quilt with it!! We are out of town for a wedding now, which brings me to my big finish for the week- it's a wedding gift! But I didn't really know the happy couple's favorite colors or their house's style so I just went with a Christmas quilt.

I made it a nice little matching storage case with a clear plastic window on the front for a page of instructions about how to store and clean a quilt.

With my fancy new machine I was able to use a funky stitch to attach the plastic. I did this really quickly this morning before we left so, shh!- don't tell, but it got a little crooked. (I am being sarcastic about the shh! thing. It is drunken sailor crooked, but when the quilt is in it you can't tell quite as much. I didn't have time to make another one, so, meh, whatever.)I like the idea of a zigzag quilt with no HSTs like Amanda Jean's tutorial, but I wanted pointy points all the way around. So what I did was add a white strip all the way around, except for the left side, where I added two strips. I had intended for this to be an oblong quilt, but ran out of the white on white polka dots, so Paul and I got real cozy with the seamrippers (yes, my wonderful husband helped me rip apart two sets of blocks, but he whined a lot so that kind of took away from the sweetness of it) and the quilt became square. (Well, sort of square. I won't switch sewing machines halfway through a quilt again.) If I do this again I won't put the extra fabric on the sides, but I would do it on the top and bottom.

I finished hand stitching the binding on the way here today. Which is one of my favorite ways to spend a car ride. I actually really like doing the binding. For this one, since there were... issues... with the "squareness" of the quilt, I used a white on white for the binding, too. Normally I like a contrasting binding, but for this quilt, well, not so much.

For the quilting, I did a double stitch in the ditch.

Where I had striped fabric, I cut it so that the stripes go the same direction.

I even made a label for this quilt! (The back is a flannel sheet.)
Just a shot of it hanging over the railing at the motel. You can see how the color is graduated from light to dark.

Unfortunately, the Friday finish over at Lit and Laundry is a sad one this week. I will let you head over and read about her kitty.