Christmas Quilts

Today I'm going to show you some of my Mum's Christmas quilts. She took up quilting when she retired and spent much of her time making quilts; some were sold to raise money for charity and some were given away but we still have a huge pile of them. Most of the Christmas quilts are small ones, made to hang on the wall.

First of all, there's the big Christmas quilt that she made for us when we first moved into this house. The fireplace in the middle is the one in our kitchen.

Here's a close up of that central panel. The stove is still there but the blue kettle wore out years ago.

The centre is surrounded with applique blocks with a festive theme. There's another Father Christmas ...

... several different snowmen ...

... and, of course, lots of angels ...

Angels appear in a lot of Mum's quilts and they're nearly always of the homely variety, like this one with her cat angel or the flying angel, complete with basket.

The next border is made up of a combination of Christmas tree fabric and panels showing the Twelve Days of Christmas before the whole thing is surrounded with some holly fabric.

This quilt is on the coffee table in the front room this Christmas, much to the delight of the two cats. Linnet sits under the table and Tolly tries to get at her from outside until he catches his claw in the quilt and pulls it off the table - normally on top of Linnet. It's a game that neither of them has got tired of yet.

The next quilt features a Christmas tree appliqued on top of a pieced background.

In this picture you can see how some of the decorations are cut out of patterned fabric to make use of the images.

This little quilt is a Christmas Sampler made using foundation piecing. This involves machine stitching over a paper pattern which is later torn away. It's a good technique for getting very accurate shapes, even at a small scale like this.

These flying geese blocks are only about an inch across and would be very difficult to piece accurately without using a foundation.

I like the way she's used patterned fabric to supply the face for this Father Christmas ...

... and the spiral on this star shows that you don't just have to follow the pieced shapes when it comes to quilting ...

Each block is set against red and green frames and then the whole quilt has a wide border. I like the little pieced corners too.

The next quilt was always very popular with the children as it has lots of little pockets (the red squares) to hold chocolate.

Mum used to get chocolate Father Christmases to peep out of each pocket until they made them bigger. From then on, they had to go in the pockets head first! That border is the fabric she used for lots of her Father Christmas faces, including twice on this quilt.

Can you see the reindeer quilted behind the first one?

Another pre-printed panel of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' was used for this next quilt, with some of the words quilted in the middle.

The angels in this quilt are unusually traditional for Mum - no hair for a start. For that reason we've always called this quilt 'Chemo Angels'.

The following two quilts are stained glass in fabric form, first a Christmas robin ...

... and then a candle ...

This one was actually made for us and is hanging where I can see it as I write this.

Finally, I thought I'd show you two tiny Christmas quilts. The first one is about six inches square and is decorated with buttons and beads.

And then there's the quilted Christmas card ...

Mum made quite a few of these little fabric postcards, always featuring one of her trademark, deliberately bad poems. As you can see, this one has a knitting theme.

I've got more of these postcard quilts somewhere that I can show you another day. Mum also made me a new patchwork stocking every year ...