Forest Animals Winter/Holiday Quilt

The forest animals are getting ready for the Winter Solstice! You can see how low the sun is in the sky in this photo taken mid-morning!

This was a quilt kit I picked up on sale. It is a past season fabric designed by Cori Dantini call “Winter News” from Blend Fabrics. The pattern is their Menagerie Quilt Pattern which can be used with other Blend Fabric designs. The kit had all the fabric needed to make the quilt, including backing and binding. That’s fairly unusual. All I had to add was the batting. Except….I modified the pattern and substituted the solid light green for the grey branch and berry fabric seen in the center row sashing. It’s beautiful fabric but just a bit too grey for me at this time of year!

I also deleted the top and bottom border on the quilt, making my quilt linear, with a more modern feel.

The backing is a wood-grain fabric. There were 3 yards of fabric in the quilt, plenty to make the back. But the wood grain would have being horizontal and I wanted it to be vertical. So I added a strip of left over animal fabric to make the backing wide enough, and I have enough food grain fabric left to back another little quilt. That’s a win-win!

You can see the wood grain backing here in the lower left corner.

Here’s a close up the fabric. Look carefully in the light blue fabric to see some forest animals hiding in the underbrush! So much fun!

"Snowflake" Quilt Completed

Spring has arrived and my version of Nicole Daksiewwicz’s quilt “Snowflake” is finally done!

Look back to my post of February 20, 2020, to see more about this quilt and how I pieced the background.

I used a walking foot to quilt it. Because of the varied block sizes in my background, there was a lot of stopping and restarting. I quilted along the seams of the blocks in the background but ran long lines of stitching through the white snowflakes. I followed the angles of the white blocks which created lots of intersecting lines. So the snowflake has lots of interest and texture.

It took me almost a week to quilt this lap quilt. I had lots of “are we done yet?” moments. But the end result was worth the tedium.

Quilting detail of snowflake. And yes, the diagonal lines are intentionally asymmetric.

So, it was a lovely warm March day when I took the photos shown. But I couldn’t resist adding a couple photos taken a few days later, the day I wrote this post! Gotta love Spring in New England!

“Snowflake” quilt on a snowy day!

And this one…just to be show it really is snowing!

This was a great project. But if I ever make it again, the background blocks will all be the same size to make the quilting easier.

This pattern and other patterns designed by Nicole Dakseiwicz, and be found at her website, Modern Handcraft.

Notice: This blog is not monetized: I do not use affiliate links. When there are links in a post, they are to give credit to another creative person, because I like or have used a product, or to help the reader easily find supplies for a project.