Christmas Whimsy

This is basically a duplicate post.  Last Friday, I was welcomed by Amy as a guest blogger for Sew and Tell Friday.  I posted quite a few pictures over there of the supersize Christmas shoofly quilt that I did not share here.  Since I want to order one of those Blog2print books,  I need to have the pictures shown here on MY blog.  So, if you were kind enough to read my post at Amy's, you can stop reading this now because for the most part it's the same ;-)

I followed Malka's supersize shoofly quilt pattern for this quilt which I have named Christmas Whimsy.   This quilt came together much quicker than the No Worries shoofly quilt I recently made.  The four Christmas prints used are Michael Miller Tree Trimmers, Michael Miller Folk Art Trees, Robert Kaufman O' Tinsel Tree and Robert Kaufman Groove.  The neutral fabric used for the background is from a bolt of Moda I had in my stash.

As you can see there are various quilting designs going on here.  I am determined to if not master, at least improve, my FMQ skills!  My plan was to quilt each quadrant densely yet differently.  However, when it came time to quilt, my machine had other ideas.

First, I stippled the center diamond area which worked fine.  

Feeling confident, I tried my hand at pebble quilting the Groove (dots fabric) quadrant.  That's when my machine rebelled.  Towards the end, my "pebbles" were getting larger and larger with more and more space in between just to finish and be done with it ;-)

I switched back to my walking foot and used that to quilt a spiral in the Tree Trimmers (peppermint fabric) section.  Let me tell you it was very difficult maneuvering (basically swirling) this size quilt on my machine.  I was very glad to finish the spiral.

For the O' Tinsel Tree (pink fabric) area, I again used my walking foot and echo quilted around the center of the block.  This looked boring so I randomly quilted lines and blocks in the center square.

Getting tired of using my walking foot, I switched back to FMQing and quilted loops for the Folk Art Trees (green fabric).

Since I stippled the center diamond, I also chose to stipple the triangular neutral areas on the top and bottom, whereas a walking foot was used to quilt organic lines in the four neutral corners.

I chose to use two different neutrals for the backing because I wanted to keep it simple and highlight the quilting.  I did have a hard time photographing that neutral background though.  For the binding, I went with the Robert Kaufman Groove dot fabric and Amanda Jean's machine binding tutorial.

Well, thanks for bearing with me as I take care of some blog housekeeping duties.  Back to regularly scheduled programming soon;-)