Holiday Medley Finish

It all started with this fat 1/8th bundle of Holiday Medley

which I won from Kimberley @mybrownbagstudio back in June.  I looked around for a pattern, most seem to use fat quarters not 1/8ths.  We haven't got a Christmas quilt in this household yet.  To be honest the colours aren't really anything like my normal brights.  The french ladies love this range and I was quite tempted to sell them the bundle and buy more winterkist but no, I won it, it's free fabric and I want to be able to remember winning.

So I grabbed my well worn copy of Fat Quarterly Shape Workshop and looked for a pattern, I happened on John Adam AKA Quilt Dad's Cub Crawl quilt.  It was smaller than I wanted and used fat quarters not 1/8th, so I got busy drawing on the back of a big brown A4 envelope, measuring if I could get the cuts out of a fat 1/8th but have more variety and more blocks..... Yup and some left over :)

I cut, I sewed on my dodgy Janome with the uneven stitching, I ironed and then I had a flimsy :)
Sunday evening I decided that it was time to get it quilted, I've bought some 100% cotton sheets from La Redoute to use as backing and I had some 100% cotton Hobbs batting.

 I wanted to try floating a quilt on the frame so armed with my faithful Aurifil 50wt, new needle and 3 wound bobbins started quilting.  The anticipation of thread breakages, needles breaking and lots of swearing wasn't too pleasant but I knew i'd at least get it started and a few rows done.....
WOW I managed to quilt the whole thing, no needle breaks, only one thread breakage and with stops only to load the 2 bobbins in :) I'm not sure what it was, perhaps the thicker backing, the batting (although the quilt is really think now and has a fluff sheen to it, will stick to 80/20 in future) or just I was more relaxed. I think I'm getting there with speed, stitch size and my saddle chair definitely helps because I can scoot along with the frame at the needle height and see what I'm doing, rather than standing and having to bend over.

Yesterday was spent making a scrappy binding out of the left over fabric and last night, I was hand sewing 8m's of binding on.

Here's the finished article, although there are some crinkly edges and I need to cut off thread ends and find the fluff ends, not a bad day :)  I think it finished at about 70" by 56" cos I haven't measured it yet

The kids and the puppy love it but I'm putting it away until December :)

To my American friends, Happy Voting :)