Festive Forest Quilt & Free Pattern

Hello everybody! It’s been awhile since my last post (understatement of the year), but I’m really happy to finally be able to share one of the projects I completed during my hiatus.

It’s a holiday quilt I designed around the newest collection by my fellow Michael Miller fabric designer, Tamara Kate, called “Festive Forest.

But, first, I have to gush a bit over how cute these fabrics are… don’t they make you want to start your Christmas sewing right now?

Of course I love the foxes with their charming striped shirts, but check out the partridges and ornaments hanging from those deer antlers!

The colors are definitely christmas-y, but with a fresh twist. I’ve always loved lime green, pink and aqua together, and the forest greens and reds complement them perfectly.

So, what kind of quilt does one make with a fabric collection called “Festive Forest”?

Well, a tree quilt, of course.

I designed three different paper pieced tree blocks, all the same outer dimension, that you can mix and match how you like. I used a lot of Cotton Couture solids as well, in addition to white on white polka dots which I thought were quite appropriately reminiscent of wintery snowfall .(But, I think this would be adorable in woodland fabrics, too!)

The back was the perfect place to showcase this awesome large scale forest fabric, “Winter Woods”, and big chunks of my other favorites, as well.

Besides being made of just about the most darling fabric ever, this quilt is especially dear to me because it’s the first example of something I’ve free motion quilted that was larger than 18″ square. And it wasn’t horrible, in fact, I quite enjoyed it. I did an overall stipple on the patchwork tree center and a sort of concentric ornament-y shape and waves along the outer borders.