Home for the Holidays

Yes, it's Independence Day tomorrow in the US and some people might be heading home, but I'm talking about Christmas. I finished my tree skirt and named it "Home for the Holidays" because it makes me want to have Christmas at our house! Of course we now live in sunny Florida so my fantasy of having it underneath the tree with prettily wrapped presents on it, while there's a roaring fire in the fireplace, with us all snuggled underneath a homemade quilt drinking egg nog is pretty much blown. Oh well, a girl can dream.

Taking some nice outside photos of it also proved to be a challenge. It just didn't look right under a palm tree (not that I could find any small enough). Snow would have been a better backdrop but I'll have to settle for a breezy, sunny day in Orlando instead.

 The binding really proved challenging on this project. I was almost out of fabric and had just enough yardage for the straight binding but then what to do about the tree opening? Luckily I made a mistake when cutting my blocks and had three 8½ inch blocks leftover so I used this video tutorial that I found online to make enough bias strips for the opening. (I didn't make a tube because the pieces were so small).  Since I wasn't sure how long the bias binding needed to be, I couldn't join it to the straight binding until after it was attached. It was just one of those days where I joined the bindings incorrectly two times before getting it right.

Of course I was so excited to finish this project that I just now noticed while writing this post that I put the wrong date on it! It's technically a July finish but I didn't realize it when I created the label. Oops!