Fellow Quilters,

                Today I am participating in a blog tour for Quilters Newsletter’s Best Christmas Quilts 2012, so for all visitors from the blog tour, a big Welcome!  I hope you enjoy your visit to my blog, and even choose to subscribe.  I don’t post often, but when I do post, I try to make the posts interesting, giving a glimpse into what I am working on, and what is happening at Northcott.

                Today’s post is about my Golden Gifts quilt featured in Best Christmas Quilts, and it is classic Patti.  What do I mean by this?  Well, for years I have been designing and making quilts that showcase fabrics most quilters shy away from – panels, border stripes, large scenic prints, etc.  I have been with Northcott for 25 years (I started when I was 4 – haha), and have made it a personal goal to use these “interesting” fabrics in projects, to encourage other quilters to use them as well.  After all, if quilters don’t buy them, Northcott will stop designing them.  This would be a shame, as they are so much fun to work with – they allow me to make difficult-looking quilts with very little effort.

Golden Gifts is a perfect example of this.  After I designed this queen-size quilt, Susanne, my talented dynamo of a piecer, sewed the quilt top in one day – it’s that fast!  Imagine – a queen-size quilt in one day!!  You see, this quilt incorporates a panel (or 6 of them, actually) from Northcott’s Stonehenge Christmas Traditions collection.  The panel itself makes a super-quick wall quilt or small lap quilt – simply add a border or 2 to make it a bit bigger (go to http://www.northcott.com – Stonehenge Christmas Traditions to see 2 terrific bed-size quilts that use the complete panel).  Not content to use the panel as-is, I wondered what else I could do with it, so I cut it up into large segments and used them as appliquéd “blocks” in my quilt.  The patchwork-printed border of the panel became my “pieced” sashing.  Add a couple of nice wide borders to frame the center, and you’re done!  The trick to making the printed blocks look like they are appliquéd or pieced is to quilt on the lines separating the motifs or patches.  The Christmas Traditions panel has metallic gold outlines dividing the motifs and patches, so I used Superior Threads’ Metallic gold thread to quilt this gem.  I took this quilt on a whirlwind tour of Massachusetts in June, and it received rave reviews.  Quilters and shop owners alike had to inspect the quilt up-close to see that the blocks weren’t actually appliquéd or pieced.  Numerous shops are kitting this project, including several in Massachusetts, and Fat Quarter Shop is kitting it for Quilters Newsletter readers.

The magazine hit the newsstands Tuesday, and is chock-full of fabulous holiday projects of all sizes.  I am rather partial to Diane Nagle’s Holly & Ivy tree skirt and Tanesha Nurse’s Selvage Christmas Tree mug rugs – how clever!  Christmas quilts are near and dear to my heart – I cover every bed in my home with a holiday/winter quilt December 1st.  Please tell me what your favorite holiday fabric projects are – do you make bed quilts, lap quilts, wall hangings or placemats?  Leave a comment on my blog post before 11:59 p.m. MDT tonight (August 24, 2012) for a chance to win a bundle of Stonehenge Christmas Traditions & White Christmas and a copy of Best Christmas Quilts. I will draw one name at random. One comment per person, please. Open to those who haven’t won something from Quilters Newsletter in the last 90 days.  And stay tuned for a few more holiday quilts that Susanne and I have whipped up using Stonehenge, coming next week!

Thanks for visiting,

Patti