Rudolph made it!

I tossed Jingle Patch out onto our 10 inches of snow for pictures on December 23rd before I got the red binding sewn on.  I wanted pictures before the snow was completely trampled by excited kids!  I finished stitching the binding on to my Rudolph quilt in the evening on December 23, so it was all set for Christmas Eve snuggling, but haven’t gotten around to taking pictures with the binding.  Christmas cheer took precedence!  I hope you all had a lovely day as well.

 

I freemotioned swirls all over the body.  Quilting an allover pattern was new for me, and overall I’m happy with how it turned out.  I won’t show you a close-up though.  Distressingly many stitches are ridiculously long!  I need practice apparently, but I don’t enjoy machine quilting enough to want to!

The snowflakes are outline quilted in the green.  I tried some freemotion in the snowflakes but didn’t like how the white looked with needle holes in it.  I then tried stitching in the ditch but didn’t have a steady enough hand there, even with the walking foot, and it looked messy so that was picked out as well.  Wobbles didn’t show as much when quilting just a bit away from the seam, so that’s what I did in the end. Of course I quilted half of the flakes by turning the quilt at every point in a flake and wrestling the mass of the quilt through the throat space before I clued in that I could sew some bits in reverse and not have to turn everything completely around.  And yes, I know that if I freemotioned the outline quilting I wouldn’t be pivoting at all, but again, my hand isn’t steady enough yet and I just wanted this to be done and look crisp!

I believe this will be my last finish of 2012.  The pattern is “Jingle Patch” by Denise Starck and the Quiltmaker staff, in the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of Quiltmaker, with the borders from “Polar Patch” from the Nov/Dec 2011 issue.