14 Apr The Holly-est Quilt Ever
In July 2021, I ordered this beautiful printed panel by Melody Miller of Ruby Star Society. I have been a fan of Melody’s retro style for a long time so when I saw this panel featuring some of her favourite designs, I was instantly inspired.
I knew the panel was going to take a while to be shipped because it was a pre-order (during the pandemic) with no guaranteed delivery date. I didn’t care, I set to work designing the quilt I planned to make with it whenever it arrived.
7 months later (!) the fabric showed up in my mailbox and I was so delighted to dig into it. I cut apart the panel and got to work cutting full circles out of it. I used Ruby Star Society Birthday Funfetti in Cream for my background fabric. Cutting the background pieces was time consuming and I had a lot of leftover fabric (from the discarded inner circles) that I set aside for a future project.
Here are some close-ups of the full circle blocks…
Next I made half circles (4 vertical, 4 horizontal) to to along the top, bottom, and sides.
And finally, the quarter circles – one for each corner of the quilt.
After all my curved pieces were completed, I dug in the “easy” part… ten gajillion flying geese and squares to fill in between the curved blocks. I used Ruby Star Society Spark fabric in a variety of colours creating a diagonal rainbow effect. The flying geese blocks were tedious, but the pay-off was tacking everything up on my design wall as I went and the reward of seeing it all start to come together.
Once I finished up all the geese, I sewed all my rows together. Here are some close-up photos of my finished quilt top…
I made myself some custom cardstock paper templates to mark the quilt for my edge-to-edge walking foot quilting, including some “orange peel” curved quilting over the circle blocks. I used two colours of thread (pink and aqua).
I hand-stitched the binding over the course of a few evenings in front of the TV. I think that if you have the time to sit with a quilt and hand-bind it, the nice clean looking finish is totally worth the time.
And voilá! I have a finished quilt. I think this is the most “Holly” quilt I’ve ever made and I am totally in love with it.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.