Christmas Album Finishing Kit Peeks!

January was a super busy month! There are always so many thing to get wrapped up after Christmas, an office that needs a serious clean-up, and my friend Tere and I were invited to lecture and have a workshop at a local quilt guild-- Bayberry Quilter's of Cape Cod. It was a huge honor, as it is a group filled with very talented people. (Artist's always pick a great place to live!) Of course, in my excitement I forgot to take pictures. We had a wonderful time, and really enjoyed chatting with everyone after about their own quilting stories. 

So now it's February, and it's really overdue to finish our Christmas Albums! If you're not feeling Christmas at this point, why not finish in the fall... but we hope this sneak peek of our finishing kit will inspire you to stay the course. Just look at those beautiful blocks...

We trimmed our large ones to 6-1/2" x 6-1/2" and our charm size to 3-1/2" x 3-1/2."  There are three more designs to come, but they will be coming fast!
Now that the calendar is clear, we hope to close this out by Valentine's Day...  finishing kit and all.

We have a 6-1/2" square ruler, and we taped a little 4x4 window on it, which made for accurate and quick cutting. We'll be posting a full tutorial on this later.

Time to pick sashing fabric! This is always such a dilemma-- it is SO HARD to find the perfect one, and when we do, you want to buy it... and sometimes it isn't even available anymore.

SO...

We had this great idea... we are all embroiderers, so why not embroider our own fabric?

That ended up being much easier than driving from store to store, and searching online.

So here it is! The top one we thought was a little too heavy, the middle one was a little light, but the bottom one was just right. hee hee. 

 
 Trimming was so easy with the basting line, and sewing was just as easy-- we left our stabilizer in and all we had to do was stitch along the dotted line.

Isn't that just so pretty!

If you remember, our layout inspiration was the Caroline's Garden quilt, our first ever show quilt.

So before you rush to buy, you can see we still need a cornerstone design, and a beautiful swag for the borders. 

But we hope we've given you the vision to re-energize your efforts, and a promise that then end is in sight. 

We seriously cannot wait to hang this up the day after Thanksgiving... thanks for joining us!

xox 

Carol