A nice surprise and more Christmas quilts

Monday morning I got a very nice surprise. I won the giveaway on Red Pepper Quilts for a Half yard bundle of Pat Bravo's natures Elements fabric. I love the colors and I can hardly wait to see it "in person".

I  have been busy getting out all my Christmas dishes and quilts and making more place mats. about the time I was thinking I have too many Christmas quilts I decided that maybe I need a couple more for a couple of places but not for this year. I do have one in progress that has been in progress for 2 years,maybe next year.

I made 4 more place mats using this same blue snowman fabric and different red strips. They are all alike except for different red  fabric. I don't thave them quilted yet. They will all go for our visitation pastor and his wife to take to  the shut-ins and nursing home patients.









 I made this quilt  last year and I made a bunch of small projects with the little motifs and log cabin strips, pot holders  and mug mats and little bitty quilts for little  places. I was in the use "it all up" frame of mind. One of the ladies in our quilt guild said she has no stash, she buys what she needs and uses it up. I thought that sounded smart after sorting and sorting and organizing and reorganizing all my left overs from many years over and over and over again.
I pretty well used up all of the left overs from this piece. I did have a few  red strips left that I used this year in some mug mats. The little gingerbread people are foam cut outs that my great grand children decorated with glitter pens a couple of years ago. I try to use all the things the kids make and it is sometimes a challenge to figure out where to put it all but I think it pleases them to see it.

   The quilt below is a wonky log cabin I made a few years ago probably before wonky was in style. I bought the Letters to Santa fabric but the rest came mostly from fabric I had left over from years of quilting. I quilted it in the ditch around the blocks and then handquilted with big stitch using embroidery floss around the edges of the focus squares. I did a search on-line for Merry Chrismas in other languages and free motion quilted them all around the border. The other photo is the back  of the quilt.

This is a more sedate log cabin quilt that I originally made to use for a table cloth. I turn my plaid quilt over so the back shows and put the Christmas log cabin crosswise on the bed. I didn't notice all the various things laying on the bed when I took the photo but that's OK; it is kind of typical of the way I do things.