Christmas Quilts

A friend of mine got married in June and for their wedding present I said I'd make them a lap quilt and just to let me know if there was a colour preference and if they wanted any particular theme. Well it looks like I'm going to be making them a Christmas quilt.

I found the pattern shown below on the Hoffman site (http://www.hoffmanfabrics.com/content/content-folder.asp?FolderID=7). I like the overall design but I am going to make a few modifications to it. When I looked at the instructions I wasn't too thrilled since the person who designed it is cutting most everything into triangles and then sewing all the blocks together on the bias. This is a recipe for disaster.

My first modification is to the green and black HSTs. I'm changing them to plain square blocks but I'm going to do some fussy cutting of the four fabrics below to get a good visual composition for the blocks. Also I'm changing the size of the blocks to 6 1/2" since that is more in line with the image sizes of my fabrics. If my blocks remained at 10 1/2", which is the original size, then I would get things like part of a birds head in with a whole bird.

These are the fabrics for the 4 patch blocks, which is not the way that the blocks are made in the pattern. In the pattern the cream coloured sections are made up of 2 different cream triangles. Personally I didn't think it makes a lot of difference to the overall quilt and who wants to cut a bunch of triangles when a 4 patch block will do.

Since I had to buy a minimum of a 1/2 yard of all of these different fabrics I realized that I would have enough left over Christmas fabric to make a second Christmas quilt if I pick up some additional fabric for the border and now I have a Christmas present that will be ready for someone on my list. So here are the two fabrics that I will be using for the borders.

For the back of the wedding quilt I'm going to use a red fabric and for the second one I will see what left over Christmas bits I have and make up a scrappy back augmented with fabric from my stash. I won't likely be starting these until September given what I have on my quilting plate at the moment but I thought I'd share the wonderful fabrics that came in the mail this week.