At last!

You may not believe it, after all this time, but I’ve finally finished ‘Tis the Season! While I didn’t get it done before last Christmas, it’s ready and waiting for the next one. To recap the “story”, I took a class from Claudia Dinnell, whose design I’d seen and loved. The pattern is only available at this point via a class, so off I went. That was in August. After two days in class, I came home with two blocks completed and having made my first attempts at multiple hooping for machine embroidery. Over the course of the next few months, I continued making the embroidered blocks on my Bernina, finally putting everything together into a top. The quilting took forever! Of course, there were interruptions for the Christmas season and other things that had to take temporary precedence, but it’s finally complete. 🙂

I machine quilted a different (or slightly different, at least) motif in each embroidered block, with diagonal lines in the text blocks. Here you can see parts of some of those motifs and some of the straight lines around the text.

At first I was puzzled about what to do in the embroidered border, but then I decided simply to repeat the previously-used motifs randomly all the way around the quilt. As a sort of counterpoint to the quilting in the embroidered areas, I quilted straight lines with a zigzag between them in the red borders.

All in all, I’m very happy to have finished this, and my family will enjoy it during the Christmas holidays.