holiday wishes blog hop

Welcome to my stop on the Holiday Wishes book blog tour! It's time for Christmas in July with Fat Quarter Shop and author Sherri Falls. This book is full of great quilts (10 of them, including the sampler shown on the cover), plus a runner and a tree skirt.

I was curious to see if I could translate a Christmas quilt into a Halloween quilt, and I just happened to have a fat quarter bundle of Bunny Hill's latest fabric collection, Spooky Delight. I love those little goofy cats, mice and owls, as well as the dots and stripes.  After about a month of pondering (I am not kidding... I even had the book on my bedside table!) I finally decided on the Gingham Stars pattern.

Twelve "gingham" star centers coming right up! I used the smaller prints here, and I reserved the larger prints for the star points. The blocks measure a generous 18", so you could easily turn one block into a pillow, or keep going for a king sized quilt.

The top goes together very quickly once you've finished your blocks. Super simple sashing and no outer borders! (I backstitched all the seams that fall on the outer edges so that nothing will pop apart when it's on the longarm machine.)

The patterns in Holiday Wishes are very easy to understand, and the book has lots of construction diagrams. I always appreciate having arrows to indicate which direction to press my seams. (Hey, it's hot here, and my brain doesn't always function perfectly in the heat!) Of course, Sherri provides yardage requirements, but if you use a fat quarter bundle like I did, you'll definitely have a generous amount of fabric left over for another quilt (I'm planning to make a bunch of these cute scaredy cats with my scraps).

There are lots of other projects in this book that I'd still like to make (maybe even a Christmas quilt?!) so I'll keep it near my sewing machine. There's still plenty of time before Christmas, right? You can pick up a copy here. Special thanks to Fat Quarter Shop and Sherri Falls for asking me to play along!