Christmas Cards

At Christmas we try to make a trip up to Leeds to see Rob's extended family but this year we realised that it wasn't going to work out.  Because we weren't going to see them we wanted to send a little something up to them so I put together these little trees which we posted as Christmas Cards.  I like to think that they'd make great mug-rugs but I'm having trouble convincing people that it's okay to put dirty things on quilts so I've settled for pretty-little-Christmas-decoration-things!

The trees are all 4x6 finished size and were made with a mixture of techniques - I started by strip-piecing  1.5" strips  (giving 1" finished stripes) of green fabric into a block and then sliced the trees out of the made-fabric.

Next, I pieced the tree trunks into the white 'snow' fabric (2" snow / 1.5" trunk / 2" snow for a 4" finished piece).

Finally, because the angles on the trees were tricky for me to visualise I drafted a foundation piecing template (and copied it several times) and foundation pieced the sky to the trees and then the trunk assemblies onto the bottom to finish.

I added scraps of wadding and cut backing from an old sheet and then free-motion quilted the trees to make them a bit more interesting.  I used white thread throughout to give the effect of snow and all the trees are outlined and have wavy lines in the snow.  The sky portions of each tree were quilted differently to try out various machine quilting patterns - most of the designs came from the Free Motion Machine Quilting Project) with a couple that I made up as I went along.

The trees are bound with a 1.5" straight-cut folded binding which I machined to the front and hand stitched to the back

I bought a pack of blank cards & envelopes from Paperchase and used a craft knife to cut slots 1" in from each corner and then tucked the corners through to hold the trees to the cards.