What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

It's Day 19 of my Christmas Countdown and it's The Candy Man quilt.

A few weeks ago I blogged about a spur of the moment Christmas quilt I had started.  Well, now it's finished and all ready to be used this Christmas. 

The pattern (Watling Street) was designed by Sheila Christensen and is in her book, Quilts with an Angle.  I made my quilt smaller because I only had a limited number of scrappy Christmas fabrics in my stash.  Can you believe I made a whole quilt from stash? Even the backing and the binding? Well I ...

I hadn't planned to start anything new before Christmas, but when I was pulling out Christmas quilts to  show Wellington Quilters last week, I realised that I could do with a couple more small Christmas quilts to use as table runners.

So I checked what I had in my stash and found these fabrics: 

They're not all especially "Christmas" but they are red and green and that says Christmas to me.  

Surprisingly I settled on a pattern quite quickly, and was cutting and piecing within an hour of pulling the fabrics.  

 It's finished! And I've called it Mirage.  (If I could insert the blue heart emoji here, I would.)

I love how the colours transition from top to bottom - that was my son's idea. 

The pattern is Topsy by Sheila Christensen, but I've named this quilt Mirage for a couple of reasons.

 Firstly, when I met my husband he drove a 1979 Mitsubishi Mirage and it was blue like this quilt. 

The well loved Mirage - that is not my husband in the photo.

This ...

 My youngest son turned 21 this week and I finished his Topsy quilt just in time.

I haven't been able to get outside for proper photos yet, but I took some quick photos when we tried it on his bed yesterday. 

It's the biggest quilt that I've ever made, so I had it custom quilted by my friend Rayna Clinton from Tui Song Quilting in Wellington, New Zealand. We chose the pattern together and I'm really pleased with it.  It's called Snakes Hexagons by Sharon Perry.

I put the wide back Onion Rings by Brandon ...

The Topsy quilt top is finished and I dropped it off to my long arm quilter this morning.  We looked at a lot of quilting designs, and I chose a custom pattern that I'm quite excited about.  I hope you'll think I made a good choice.  

I'm really pleased with how this quilt has turned out.  I loved going through my blue stash and finding all the fabrics that would work.  

My son will turn 21 in July, and this quilt is for him.  As you can see below, it matches the feature wall in his bedroom ...

I told you I got inspired at the Kapiti Quilt Show last week.  I saw Sheila Christensen's Topsy quilt on her stall, and I remembered that I had bought the pattern back in October at our own guild's exhibition. 

I had promised that I would make new quilts for the bedrooms when we had them painted four years ago, so I decided "this is it".  And I started cutting all my blue fabrics to make a quilt for the room with a blue feature wall.  

I'm making the Queen sized version of Sheila's Topsy pattern, and ...