First Finish of 2017

I really didn't think I would be finished with this little quilt today, but I am!  I had the embroidery left to do before quilting, and I had been putting it off.  Because we had a guest over New Years Eve/Day, my quilt room was turned into a guest room so I didn't have access to my machine.  It's been a few days since finishing up the last quilt (hexagons) so my fingers have healed up from sewing the binding.  As I mentioned in that post, that quilt really was a difficult one to work on--and in the end, painful!  Most quilts aren't like that where I am fighting sewing bindings and whatnot, but that one was from almost the very beginning.



So since no quilt room/machine, I decided to pick up a hand project and Minnesota Flurries it was!  I didn't expect to be completely finished today, but I just finished hand sewing the binding and the snowflake buttons down. The binding is a dark green fabric that I had left over from the quilt top in the pic below.

The only real change that I made to the pattern was to turn two snowmen corners so they were all facing the same direction.  I want to hang up this little quilt, so that seemed to be obvious. If I used it as a table topper, I would have left the corners alone.

This is a top I finished up a couple of days ago and is now ready to be quilted.  I plan to baste it tomorrow (but I need to figure out the backing first... I do have a lot of fabric leftover that I could piece together a backing with).



I thought I would try to applique the tree without fusible, and after sewing down the trunk and branches I had enough of that.  Not only did I have to deal with little whiskers of fabric, but you can see the trunk seems to be doing a little wiggle :)  It will likely not be as noticeable after quilting is finished... but geez!  That quilt was a project that I bought last year when it was half off after Christmas.  I still have one more winter-style quilt to work on from that spending spree.  I really like this quilt much better in person vs the photo, and I was thinking about changing it up by adding the blocks around the tree instead of just top/bottom and the two sides (for more of a "round robin" style).  In the end, I went with the pattern.


What was kind of fun was that this quilt kit came with a fabric called "strip it".  It is basically yardage of strips.  You can get a larger assortment of prints for a quilt project, and depending on how you cut the fabric, you can make half square triangles without the work.  I didn't do that method because I was confused at first (this section of instructions was just before I got sick), but after figuring out the instructions, it is a neat idea.  I think I have about a yard and a half left and there are like 20 or so stripes that are 2.5" wide going across the width of fabric (this is half of WOF, the other side after the fold repeats).

I guess you could say I'm not tired of Christmas yet... still working on it :)  Though, my other quilt kit that I mentioned is more "icy" fabrics vs Christmasy.

Happy new year!