A Hand Made Winter Quilt - My First Pieced Quilt

The idea for this quilt started several years ago while I was on a Christmas tour of houses in our local area. The thing is...I told someone from my garden club about what I wanted to make. And if you tell someone, then you need to do it!  I described a red and white quilt with red embroidered cardinals. Ta da,  that is what happened!  Not that I didn't consider other embroidery motifs before I made it. There is the cutest little reindeer embroidery pattern from Ann the Gran called "Rudolph Reindeer" and so many snowflake patterns, too. But in the end the "Winter Cardinal" won out. This way it is a winter quilt rather than just a Christmas quilt. 

I found the directions for this easy quilt in a Gooseberry Patch Christmas book I checked out from our very tiny local library. The next challenge was to choose the fabric. I needed to pick six fabrics (half a yard each) the ones making the final cut where: two plain fabrics, red and white; two dotted fabrics, white with white dots and red with white dots; red and white stripes;  and a small gingham check in red and white...plus the white polar fleece for the back (about 2 and a half yards). Finding reds that did not clash and whites that didn't look pink next to the red took awhile. There were several fabrics that just did not work as well as I had hoped, for instance the zigzag fabric shown above and a large gingham check not shown.  I was exhausted and hadn't even started to sew! Made several 7" square templates from my favorite freezer paper and cut out a total of eighty squares. I ended up using only 54 squares (six per row - 9 rows total) which made a perfect cuddle on the couch size.

The cardinals took awhile to embroider, some are complete in the picture above. And as you can see I had a lot of help for the layout. 

So much help that I ended up laying it out on the dining room table. Time to sew the blocks into rows, then the rows together using a 1/4 inch seam allowance. Finished squares are 6 inches. Sewing the squares together went much more smoothly than I originally anticipated! The block corners met where they were supposed to. Imagine!

I researched several quilting websites before this step. Time to make the quilt "sandwich" with the top, batting and the polar fleece backing. I used sew-able basting spray "Spray n Bond" between layers which I've used many times to hoop fabric for embroidery and had on hand. Then large safety pins to hold the layers in place.

Taking my time and using my walking foot for first time since I started sewing many years ago, I carefully stitched 5/8 inch stitch line from the seam on all sides of the blocks. I loosened the tension on the sewing machine and used a large stitch. Love the way it looks! Trimmed the batting to an inch and a half all the way around. Then pulled and pinned the polar fleece evenly around the quilt, mitering the corners and stitched in place. Fini.

Tilly loves it, too!