Christmas quilt commencement – say that 3 times fast!  I decided to take a mini break from the Splendid Sampler because I was itching to see how this Christmas quilt is going to come out.  I am really spoiled by the AccuQuilt and considering how easy this quilt is to put together, I’m seriously tempted to have custom dies made if I ever make this quilt again.

I don’t remember if it was Cotton + Steel fabric that we were looking at a month or two ago, but I distinctly remember being at a quilt store with our road trip friends, and telling my friend that aqua and pink do not blend with Christmas fabric.

Here I am today, making a Christmas quilt with all sorts of non-red and non-green colors.  Why? I don’t have a good answer for that.  Part of it is because these colors are outside of my comfort zone; they’re unexpected.  There are a lot of people who are a lot better at picking out fabrics than I am so the more I work with these, the idea is the more I’ll learn through the process.This is from the Cotton + Steel Garland line .

After I cut out all the triangles in 4 different sizes, I did the same for the white pieces that will be sewn on each side.  Actually I didn’t cut all of these out at once; I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing so I cut out 4 of the x-large ones and started there.

I cut them fine, although just as I was told, the plastic used for templates is very thin so it definitely pays to use a ruler on top of it and have the rotary blade cut against the thicker rulers.

I messed those first 4 up so I waved a friendly hello to my seam ripper and explained we might be spending some quality time together on this quilt.  I had matched up the bottoms of the triangle and side piece exactly.  Turns out what really needs to match up is 1/4″ out on each side, right at the edge.

Once I finally figured that out, then I started making fast time putting these together.  There are 4 sizes of triangles.  I will have 12 large blocks, 9 medium, 12 small and then 6 x-small.  In the past 2 days I’ve cut out all the triangles and enough to piece all the large and medium blocks so I’m more than halfway done with piecing the triangles.

Then it will be time to piece the strings together that make up the non-triangle blocks. If I weren’t working on anything else, I think I could knock out the top of this quilt in a week but it will take longer than that because of a few other things going on this week.