Christmas Trees Wall Hanging.

Last year I bought the book Modern Holiday by Amanda Murphy. I particularly liked the Holiday Forest pattern but it was rather large for what I was wanting. Luckily one day I was looking at one of my favourite quilting blogs, The Sewing Chick, and it's Author Tessa Marie had made a mini version which she achieved by using the templates at the size printed on the page rather than enlarging them as in the instructions in the book. The original quilt features a fabric strip top and bottom with some pretty appliqued snow flakes which although beautiful I decided not to include.

Unfortunately I didn't manage to finish it in time for Christmas but made sure I finished it now rather than leaving it until just before Christmas this year.

I went with fairly classic Christmas colours, all luckily from my stash.
 I'm now going to do that thing which I think most of us do which is to point out a couple of faults with it! If you look at the smallest trees they ended up with a variety of different sized trunks, I don't know how I managed that as they all came from the same template, but hey, they wouldn't all be exactly the same in nature either would they? The other problem is this quilt suffers from wavy edges disease but luckily it looks worse in the photo than in reality.

Now for the quilting. I recently purchased (in a sale of course) the Craftsy class "Free Motion Quilting a Sampler" by Leah Day. It's a great class where Leah demonstrates a variety of free motion quilting designs. What I like is Leah gives yous permission to cross over your quilting lines and uses travel stitching where you quilt over your quilting to reach the next area you want to quilt.
The large tree below uses the Paisley pattern from the class. I must admit I didn't practice the designs first but just went for it whilst repeatedly watching what Leah was doing in the video.    

The blue sashing uses Spiral Chain, again I watched the video a few times and then just went for it. I really enjoyed this design and can see myself using it again in the future.
The small trees use Pine Needles, rather appropriate I felt.

 

 

Overall I was pleased with the quilting and it was great to learn some new designs from the Craftsy class. I'm looking forward to trying out some new designs on future projects.
Linking up with I Quilt Thursdays at Pretty Bobbins