…a quilted forest…

The first Sunday of Advent is the day we pull 7000 boxes out of the shed, put up the tree, and then begin the annual Christmas Craft Museum installation. We hang and display handmade decorations of all kinds, and then get busy making the next current year’s crop of crafty goodness. It’s so much fun getting them out and reminiscing over Christmases past. Most are from within the past decade, but one in particular is more than double the age of the rest.

I made this wall hanging as a teen, at sewing lessons. For years after, it hung on the wall at my parent’s house each Christmas, and then when I married and moved out of home and started building a Christmas collection of my own, it was gifted to me. The LEDs are long dead, but the quilt itself still comes out each year.

This year, I thought it might be fun to recreate it with the children. On Thursday, we hit up the fabric shop and picked our fabrics. It was really interesting to see how different their selections were! Once our chores were done on Friday, we got stuck in and got our trees pieced.

It turned out to be an excellent project to teach them the basics of quilting. All four were involved in the cutting (with a bit of help from me for Mr 7), and pieced and pressed their own trees as well. As we move into the next stage, they will also be learning basting, free motion and straight line quilting and binding. And of course, we can’t forget Mr 14 getting the chance to engage in his favourite sewing activity…

Putting my pins in colour groups! He has done this since he was a tiny toddler, and I love that he still does it now. I often walk away mid project to come back to a neatly organised pin cushion. I’m sure the day is coming he won’t do it anymore, and to be honest, I’m rather dreading the day I leave my pins out and come back to them exactly as I left them.

The quilts still need backgrounds added, and the whole things put together and finished, but we are off to a flying start. The weekend disappeared in a whirlwind of movies and pool time and new socks, so it will have to be this week’s job to get them done. I need to get hooked into Christmas outfits, but I’ve lost my Art Museum pattern. Maybe I’ll just splurge on the digital copy. I want to get my sock finished today. The kids are addicted to their Christmas puzzle books, but hopefully I can pull them away for a round or two of 12 Days. My iPad is home so I have a heap of digital art I want to catch up on. Christmas shopping also needs my attention. In around all that though, I have a terrible case of the Mondays, so I might push it all off until tomorrow and curl up on the lounge with a hot coffee and a book and ignore the world like a functional adult. Or not. May as well suck it up and get stuff done because it’s not going anywhere. Ok to-do list, let’s do this.