Winter Forest Friends

I have a very special (and somewhat unexpected) winter quilt to share with you today, boys and girls. It just came to be, almost of its own accord, as a chain of chance events and spontaneous decisions, between big projects completed and Christmas gifts made.

I have written before about the great prize I won in the Handmade Halloween link-up - a pattern by Lorna McMahon of Sew Fresh Quilts. Although I was busy with a couple of projects, I couldn't resist trying it out and was really hooked. Lorna's technique is very clever, so the sewing was much easier than I had anticipated, and between this and that I made three of Lorna's forest friends - the fox, the deer and the bear.

It was the deer that prompted the direction where it was all going - of all the browns I have I thought the most suitable shade was the one with snowflakes on it (it's a strange kind of pattern really - snowflakes in brown -, but it was on sale when I was looking for various browns for a project...) So the poor dear deer ended up looking like he had a snowflake on his nose and wasn't happy about that. And then the background, which was supposed to be just neutral, suddenly appeared to look like heavy snowfall.

That's how I decided to make it a winter quilt, and winter forest in my understanding isn't complete without a red squirrel and a hare turned white for the season. So I set myself a challenge to try and design a couple of blocks using Lorna's techinique.  I must say it took a lot of juggling the shapes to achieve a compromise between image likeness and ease of sewing, I can now really appreciate the effort Lorna puts into her beautiful creations.

I think I managed to create a reasonable hare and squirrel, and also an owl to finish the layout. I was also lucky to find this snowflake batik that completed the winter look - I saw a fat quarter of this fabric held by a lady in front of me in the queue to the till and, thankfully, there was another left.

I had a nice (leftover) piece of pine print green, which supported the forest theme, and I looked for some tree print to use in the border, but could only find this holly one - so we also have a hint of Christmas in the air. I had so little of the green left, that I had to make the binding of two fabrics, and barely had enough.

And with this tale of winter magic, farewell, boys and girls, have a most wonderful Christmas, don't forget to believe in miracles, and make sure to check out Lorna's site Sew Fresh Quilts and her weekly link-up Let's Bee Social for even more wonderful quilting inspiration.