Finished Christmas Tree Skirt.

It’s been busy the past couple of weeks and more so the last couple of days as we hosted the dinner for a progressive supper our “two-by-two” group from church put on. Lots of cleaning and putting up of Christmas themed decorations.

We put up the tree and I put the Christmas tree skirt I finished last week under it. So glad that this UFO was finally done. It took longer than I thought it would and the machine quilting took longer as well. By contrast the bug jar quilt that I’m finishing the binding on only took one day of machine quilting. Anyway here it is:

Christmas tree skirt from the “Thimbleberries Book of Quilts” by Lynette Jensen.

The only difference between my finished quilt and hers was different fabric choices and I added on a circular piece of fabric to make the skirt bigger. The original pattern went to the scalloped edge. The binding of course took forever to sew down.

Skirt under the tree waiting for presents.

Next on the list is finishing the binding on the bug jar quilt and I hope to have that finished tomorrow so I can post a couple of pictures of that as well. Then it’s on to other projects, time is flying by and running out even though I still have most of December left it feels like it’s too late to get stuff done. Happens every year this deadline kind of feeling.

Karen

Christmas Tree Skirt

Currently I’m working on a Christmas tree skirt. I’d planned to have it done and it’s possible that I might have except I want to machine quilt it and have decided to wait until after Christmas to do so because I’m getting a new MegaQuilter from Husqvarna for Christmas. My current machine is prone to bunching up thread on the underside of whatever project I’m working on so I’m not even going to try working with that machine.

Anyhow, here is a picture of the skirt so far:

Christmas tree skirt pattern by Lynette Jenson “Thimbleberries”

The pattern is from Lynette Jenson’s book “The Thimbleberries Book of Quilts”. The original pattern was very nice with three different shades of red material for the scalloped part and white in the middle with plaid bias. I didn’t really like the reds I had in my stash so I went with Christmas fabric instead. I found that the piece was too small for my tree and that the presents wouldn’t really sit on the skirt so I decided to extend it by adding some white and gold print fabric. I then blanket stitched around the scalloped edge to match the stitching on the holly leaves and berries in the middle section.

The benefit of adding this material aside from extending the skirt is that I won’t have to deal with fiddly bias binding around scallops. I do have some plaid to bind the edges so hopefully it’ll spruce up the gold print and give it some definition. The extra space will give me more practise room for some feathers I want to learn to machine quilt. I figure even if it turns out to be a rough first piece of machine quilting, the quilt itself will mostly be covered up by presents anyhow.

Karen