Gift Wrapped

I had a fantastic day on Saturday presenting a trunk show of my Stash Statement quilts and teaching a class to the Music City Modern Quilt Guild in the Nashville area (you can see all of the scrappy goodness from the class on my facebook and Instagram pages). Before I headed out of town though, I managed to finish my Christmas X Plus quilt.

I don't know about you, but I really love to work on Christmas things when the season isn't yet upon us.  Somehow, once Christmas actually gets here- you know, in mid-October in some places, and everything is decked out in red and green, my mind almost gets too saturated with those colors, and I don't enjoy it as much.  So, making this quilt in September felt just right.  I think the X Plus blocks look sort of like beautifully wrapped gifts with bows on top, so I'm calling this one Gift Wrapped.

I used the X Plus measurements in my tutorial HERE to yield a 10" finished block, but instead of using seven different fabrics in each block, I only used four.  With such a limited color palette (just reds, greens, and whites), I opted to use just one consistent fabric the four X pieces, rather than four different prints as most X Plus quilts do.  The look is a little more uniform this way, but still so pretty.    I threw in some metallic gold for a little glam, and it gives some unexpected pop to the quilt.

Since this pattern is busy with several stripe prints adding lots of fantastic movement, I quilted it with an allover stipple, which is still my favorite standby design for letting the piecing and prints really shine.  Of course, it helps that I can practically stipple in my sleep.  It is super relaxing for me.

Since I only had a quarter yard of most of the prints in the quilt, I didn't really have any leftovers for the back, but I found a few other fun Christmas prints that look awesome on the back.  In fact, I wish I had found the peppermint print beforehand so I could have used some on the front.

The darkest green fabric in the quilt is Kona Basil, and when it came time to choose the binding, I decided that a rich, dark frame would contain all of the movement in this quilt very nicely.  It's the perfect Christmas tree green, and I just love it!

This quilt, along my Fall Foliage quilt, have already been sent off to their new home.  So, my friend and his family are all set when the weather starts to get a little chilly.