I'm dreaming of a Christmas Tree Quilt

My design wall is empty. Do you know what that means? It means that I’m free to indulge in some Christmasy sewing. Woohoo! Over the next few weeks, I plan to sew a forest of Christmas trees while I prepare behind the scenes for my next sew-along.

When I fell for the Christmas in the City fabric collection, I naturally wanted to make a Christmas quilt. And what could be more fun than pretty Christmas trees? I picked out my favorites from the collection and started dreaming.

In the planning stage I hit on the idea to use my Fir Tree paper piecing pattern from the Penny Sampler Pattern club, shown here in scrappy green fabrics on a solid white background. This pattern deserves more play, don’t you think?

I started sketching and got the idea of composing the quilt in rows, with a variety of trees in each row. Instead of using a solid white background (which I am categorically against for practical stain-resistant reasons), I could utilize a different background fabric for each row. Perhaps in a sort of ombre effect?

I choose the sparkly star prints from Christmas in the City as the backgrounds for my bottom two rows. Moving upward, the background gets darker with Art Gallery Pure Solids: Ocean Fog, Spruce, Zambia Stone and Evergreen. Evergreen is intended as background for a special row at the very top - a thin border-like row with tiny star patchwork. That plush snowman flannel is, of course, for the quilt backing.

Yesterday it was time to get started. I began with arranging my fabrics to preview the general idea. I may switch the bottom background fabric to the Down the Chimney print instead of the cream stars. I think I like that better, but I’m not sure if I have quite enough. Maybe a mixture of the two then? I also experimented with different piecing techniques to sew tall, stately Christmas trees.

Tada, my first Spruce tree! I’m using traditional sewing techniques for this simpler tree style and aiming to minimize fabric waste. So far, so good.

Now, let’s dig in to one of the paper pieced Fir Trees. Here are the fabrics I’ve chosen. The reds and pinks will serve as the branches. I find that Ocean Fog solid I’m using for the background color very intriguing. It’s almost gray, but not quite.

So, that’s a start! I still need to draft plans for sewing two smaller Spruce trees and also the tiny stars at the top of the quilt, but I’m well on my way to a festive sewing season.

Enjoy the weekend, friends.