Thursday, November 28, 2013

Ta-da! Tree Skirt Finish

Happy Thanksgiving! Before it's time to eat the turkey, I thought I'd get this post up.
I finished my tree skirt top, which was also my A Lovely Year of Finishes November goal. (Done early...woo hoo!)
 I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly and easily it assembled, and I even finished it ahead of when I planned (how often can you say that about a sewing project?!?!)

 When I first showed my goal for this month, I promised that I'd share how I made this. I sewed offset strip sets to minimize my fabric waste because of the angled wedges I was cutting. Below you can see one of the strip sets, and two wedges I cut. Because of the angle, I was able to cut two different versions of wedges (1 flipped) from the strip. The first one you see below (with the wider red top) is one of my "extras" for a second tree skirt next year. The second strip (wider green bottom) is the type of wedge I used in my tree skirt. I made eight strip sets; four angled like you see below:

And four angled the opposite way, like this:
 The angles create the chevron look. If you look carefully at the strip set above (or the photo of the wedges below), you can see the only mistake I made while piecing this--in the last strip set! I reversed the order of two strips. Argh. Of course I didn't realize it until after I'd cut the wedges. With the help of a seam ripper, I fixed the five mistake wedges.

I'm so happy to have this tree skirt top done! I'm going to save the quilting of it until after the holidays because I don't want to rush it. But it'll be fun to try this out under the tree!

My 4.5-year-old wanted to sew a quilt block last weekend while I was working on the tree skirt. In an effort to buy myself a little more sewing time, I suggested that he color his block first and then we'd make what he colored in fabrics. Here is the result:






p.s. Thanks to everyone who stopped by during the blog hop party! Random generator chose #101, Linda, as the winner.


5 comments:

  1. Beautiful runner. A lot of work. But I REALLY love seeing your sweet son with his planning sheet and executed design. Gives me good ideas for my grandsons. Gotta introduce them to quilting soon.

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  2. Love the way the tree skirt turned out. Gorgeous.

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  3. What a happy piece of work! It will look wonderful under your tree! It looks like you have someone to work with on your next project. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. Tree skirt is gorgeous! But my favourite is your son's design and quilt and cute message for his teacher. So earnest and thoughtful. I have a 4.5 year old son, who just wrote Christmas cards to all his classmates. It was a long tiring process, but he insisted on finishing.

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