A Little Upcycled Gnome Christmas Quilt

This is the little quilt that I made using the fabric left from sewing up some table napkins that I talked about in my November 9, 2023 post. I ended up deleting the dark mushroom fabric. I really liked the design, but those couple block dominated the quilt. So I substituted the grey deer fabric from my stash.

I added the brightly colored strips, that which mostly aren’t colors in the blocks, to add an unexpected color pop as well as design interest.

The batting was created from leftover strips of an 80/20 mix batting used in other projects. I fused 3 strips together with quilt batting fusible tape to make a piece large enough for this quilt.

The back of the quilt is a dark green flannel with white snowflakes that has been in my stash forever. The candy cane strip binding is just the icing on the cake!

Because of its small size, I think this one is destined to be a throw for the dogs to sleep on! Lucky dogs!

The wind helping to reveal the flannel snowflake backing!

"Gnomes Spring Laundry Day" Quilt completed

“Gnomes Spring Laundry Day” quilt is done! This was a fun project! (You can click back on my posts on March 4, 2021 and March 11, 2021 for more information about how I designed and pieced the quilt).

Here’s how I quilted it. I did echo quilting around the square-in-a-square Economy blocks and around the trees. There is linear stitching in the yellow and orange bars. I used the #4 lingerie stitch on my Bernina 440 across the strips with the hanging laundry. Stretched out, the #4 stitch creates a wavy line that reminds me of a spring breeze.

Then I switched from using my walking foot and did free-motion zig-zags across the trees to look like branches of a pine tree. The zig-zags are different on all the trees, because no two trees are ever alike!

Around the back is a garden full of busy gnomes!

Note to the knitters out there who might be having a melt down the hand knit mittens hanging on the line in these photos: the mittens are dry (not recently washed and wet) and they are there just there as a prop in my photo because I couldn’t resist echoing the laundry line in the fabric! So not to worry. (And yes to your second question, I did knit the mittens, sometime way back when I was in a knitting-mitten phase)!

"Gnomes Spring Laundry Day" Quilt Project

These two fabrics from the “Winter Gnomes” line by Striped Pear Studio for Windham Fabrics just had to go into my online shopping cart a few months ago. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but they made me giggle. That was justification enough!

Then a few weeks ago, I saw this gnome fabric from Timeless Treasures, “Gnome Worry, Be Happy.” While from a different fabric company, the colors in the three fabrics are all similar and work well together. This fabric suddenly bumped a gnome quilt up to the top of my stack of projects!

So I had fabrics with gnome winter clothes and another with gnomes doing spring planting. Clearly they had washed their woolies, hung them on the line and started to work waking up the garden!

I actually purchased the “Gnome Worry, Be Happy” fabric for the back of the quilt. But those gnomes, you just never know what mischief they might be up to.

Here’s the quilt I designed in Electric Quilt 8. It is the classic Economy Block (a square in a square) and a tree block. I took the “Big and Little Trees” block from the EQ8 block library and modified it, removing the smaller of the trees and replacing it with two narrow strip patches.

“Gnomes Spring Laundry Day” quilt design

Now that I have a plan and a quilt pattern, I need to get busy!

Gnome Improv Quilt

Last finish for 2020! This is my gnome improvisational quilt.

I was given one yard of the gnome fabric by a friend earlier this year. I purchased the white on white snowflake fabric, the hot pink star fabric,the binding and the backing, but I think everything else came out of my stash.

I fussy cut out as many gnomes as I could, and then started sewing on scraps and other pieces of fabric which I cut to fit. Sometimes I sew slabs—12 x 12 inch improv blocks to make a improv quilt. I started to do that with this one, bur realized it was going to be a full size quilt…and that wasn’t what I wanted. So instead I took the blocks I’d started and turned them into sections which I sewed into strips in a variety of widths. The quilt turned out to be exactly the size of a crib batting. I hadn’t planned it out, but that was just perfect!

The back of the quilt is a flannel plaid.

The Gnome Improv quilt is quilted with a mix of swirls on the white snowflake blocks and meandering or loops on of the rest of the quilt.

The gnome on the label is wearing a mask made from the selvedge of the gnome fabric! It is 2020 after all!

Happy New Year!!