Scrap Christmas Quilt: with a little help from my friend

The quilt in photo # 1 is not mine. When Jocelyn from Happy Cottage Quilter went on her quilt shop hop, she spotted this quilt at a quilt shop called 'Rainbow's End' in Dunedin, Florida. She took the photo and posted it on her blog. I like it a lot and thought it would be great quilt to make using my Christmas fabric from my stash. I mentioned that to Jocelyn and she told me she would like to make one too if I could figure it out from the photo. Figured it out I did (my way) and with Jocelyn's permission I am posting it as a tutorial: This is my first tutorial on the blog. I have made many quilting instructions on paper, but on the blog is another thing all together. Hope it makes sense to you...!

I guest that this is a wall size quilt. Our dinning table is narrow and long and I am making this quilt for it. I sometimes use my quilt as table cloth so, it is handy to have a Christmas one too.

Last Christmas I made a simple log-cabin quilt and I had some leftover strips 2" wide. So I decided to use 2" strips as a guide. I cut a lot more 2" strips using varieties of fabric. From the strips I cut them into 8, 10, 12" lengths. Then I rejoined them randomly into a very long strips. I mixed all the colors together so that I didn't join the same colors next to each other. I hope you get what I mean. After I joined them all up into a long long ribbon, I cut a 31" length for the centre section. I need 7 x 31".

The next step is joining the 7 strips together for the centre section. I trimmed the centre block to 30.5". Now for the first border. I decided that my first border could only be 4" wide because I didn't have enough light Christmas fabric for a bigger border. The idea of this quilt is to use up my stash. I simply don't want to buy any more fabric! So I cut 4.5" wide of light color fabric and joined the two long sides of the centre section and then the top and bottom (see above).

That's all I have done so far. I have cut more strips for the outer section and I am in the process of joining them. It's looking good don't you think? At this rate I might have a new quilt for THIS Christmas WooHoo!!!

Watch this space for the next installment of the tutorial.