Green Christmas Quilt

So, my boyfriend is really hard to buy presents for. He insists that he doesn't want anything, and to be fair he honestly doesn't, but gift giving is as much because the person doing the giving wants to show their love as anything else, and so I still fight every holiday to find something that he will like. Usually I end up making something, and this christmas, I settled on a quilt!

He spends a lot of time curled up on the couch with the cats, all wrapped up in blankets and looking adorable, so it seemed fitting and useful. His favourite colour is green, so green quilt it was!

With the help of a friend who has more quilting experience than I do, I settled on a quadruple rail pattern and headed to the fabric store. Originally I was going to do four different blocks, each with a light/light-med/med-dark/dark set of fabric, but the store would only sell as small as a half meter, so I ended up doing all the same except for the dark. For that one I found four fat quarters of black background prints that I thought went with the theme, although only one is actually a green print. I think it turned out quite nice in the end, and actually it might have been a little busy with 16 different fabrics going on rather than the 7 it ended up with.

Finding green fabrics that aren't christmas print when you're shopping in november turned out to be a chalange, but the only one I ended up caving on was the binding, because it's so narrow the snowflakes end up being more of an abstract pattern. Besides, that can just be winter, right?

To make it extra cuddly, I used a supper fluffy minky fabric for the backing instead of more cotton. Man that was a bitch to quilt! It stuck to everything, including the sewing machine, and I really had to force the damn thing through, but it was worth it because OMG so soft.

I did the quilting as diagonal squares, because I didn't want to brave trying anything fancy, but I didn't want it to just be along the block edged either, because that felt boring. We'll say that the incredibly wavy stitching adds character...

I found some helpful websites and figured out how to mitre the corners of the binding properly. I hand stitched the binding down on the back, and the minky did a great job of helping make the stitches completely invisible.

It's been washed a few times now, so the batting has shrunk just enough to give that heirloom quilt puckering, which actually looks quite nice (thankfully).

This is more what the colours look like in person. Oh yeah, the whole thing is 64" square, which turned out to be a little smaller than I would make in the future, but just barely big enough to make a good lap quilt. I can't wait to make some good giant queen bed sized ones to swaddle up in! Also yes, that is a new back yard, and I'll tell you all about it next time :P.