Christmas Tree Pants

Well I’ve been showing you sneak peaks of one of my projects for my partner in the savvy seasons swap over at flickr…and I’m finally ready to show you the finished product. In fact it’s all wrapped up and ready to mail today!

A couple of you guessed, but all those wonky star blocks I made with Kate Spain’s Christmas panel have turned into Christmas Tree Pants!

I’m not sure who coined that phrase “Christmas Tree Pants” but all it means is a square Christmas tree skirt. I can’t decide if I hate the name or love it. So I’m trying to use it and see how I feel. 😉 I’m weird like that. It’s like the word “Mug Rug”. That one makes me cringe! lol

Anyway…back to the pants.

It is essentially a small quilt when all is said and done with a hole in the middle and ties along the edges to hold the open flaps together. I’m pretty proud of this for a number of reasons. I used ALL fabric and batting from my stash! Woohoo! Nothing new was purchased. I love that! And I really tried to use some things that had been hanging around for a while…even better. The binding fabric and ties were fabrics that I was actually pulling out of my stash to hide away because they were annoying me (yes, sometimes my fabrics annoy me). But as soon as I had them out, I realized that they were actually perfect for this. I had found just the right project for them! And they look great!

The backing is a large piece of DS County Fair Home Dec fabric that I got super cheap at one point and have had sitting around. Again, this was perfect. It brings out just enough of the blue accents from the front, but it is also heavy weight and great for draping around a tree. It will hold up well!

That center stripe fabric definitely took me the longest to pick out. I tried out multiple options and I wasn’t even going to put this one up on the design wall to check it out…but nothing else was working for me and so I pulled this on the off chance that it would. Well, I should have known. The stripe is also designed by Kate Spain. And though it is not the for the 12 days of Christmas line, designers often use a similar color scheme between collections due to their own personal aesthetic. There are times when that is frustrating. But here is a case where it worked well for me! And I also know that I got that stripe super cheap at my local quilt store earlier this year…so again, score!

So this tree skirt seems oddly frugal to me. Every piece of fabric in it was either given to me or bought at a deep discount. And the result in no way looks like I was trying to be cheap. I love that! I feel like it really carries the history of what so much quilting originally was…using what you had on hand and making it something beautiful and to be treasured.

I did a simple meander quilting pattern over the skirt and that was a bit harder than normal simply due to the weight of the backing. But thankfully this wasn’t a full sized quilt and I plowed my way through it fairly quickly. Once again, I always have to remind myself with free motion quilting that it is not about how any one spot on the quilt looks, it is just about the whole look when you step back. That little loop that didn’t turn out just the way you wanted it to disappears in the setting of the quilt in its entirety.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me tell you that I totally mussed up the inner corner bindings on the open square in the middle. I should have looked up how to do it (I have now!)but instead I tried to wing it thinking I could figure it out. Um yeah. Not so much. So I apologize to my partner for those shoddy corners…they’re not going anywhere but they’re not so pretty. I tried a different method on every corner and not one of them worked well. lol And this is when it is a great idea to use a busy print for your binding that hides any mistakes and make mistakes on the part that no will really see because it will be hiding under the tree next to the trunk!

So, the items are all wrapped up and ready to be sent to ??? who lives in ???. She will be getting an Emmeline apron, some ornaments, and the Christmas tree pants.

And I’ll admit that this was all a lot of work and the swaps have been keeping me from my own sewing…so I decided to step back from swaps for a bit. But I wanted to go out with a bang and what better swap is there than a Christmas one?! So a very merry Christmas to my partner. Enjoy!