12 Quilts of Christmas: My first Christmas Quilt

It's that time of year to pull out and display all the wonderful Christmas Quilts we quilters have made.  If I have enough, I'd love to share Twelve Quilts of Christmas with you.  And I'd love to see your Christmas quilts too!

Now, those linky things just aren't in my blogging repertoire yet.  So you'll just have to leave a comment with a link to your post, or the name of your blog.  We'll see if that works.

My first Christmas Quilt was pretty awful.   From later posts you will be able to see just how far I've come as a quilter - so perhaps that's the one positive thing I can say for it.

This Christmas quilt was made way back in 1984!  I had some Christmas themed pre-printed blocks and thought this would be a great way to use them.  No pattern, no quilting experience, no quilters in the family and all self-taught.  Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing!

At the time, a cozy fabric called velux, or something like that, was popular.  It was like a velour but used for blankets and bath robes and such things.  I had a 'brilliant' idea.  Use it for the back of the quilt!  It would be soft and cozy.

 I used satin blanket binding on three sides and ran out so I just folded over the top.  The blocks were quilted 1/4 inch around on both sides of the seams, but that was all the quilting in it.  See those huge areas with no quilting?!  This was the first quilt I tried to machine quilt.  I'd never heard of a walking foot - perhaps they didn't even have them at that time.  But quilting this monster was so difficult that I did the bare minimum and stopped.  I only used it a few Christmas seasons.

I didn't even use batting - which in the long run was a good thing.  Because, over time that backing fabric completely disintigrated!  Eventually I pulled off the backing - (it just came off in my hands!) - took off the blanket binding and started taking it all apart.

I'll use the printed blocks in some other crafty projects.  (Yes, there are two of them hiding in the back row made into pot holders.)  The red and green pin-dot will go into future quilts - finally ones they can be proud to be a part of.