8 strategies for surviving the holidays with Free Motion Mavericks

Do you want to know the secret to surviving the holidays? These are my suggestions. BTW I can’t be held responsible if others in your family don’t approve of these great innovative ideas!

8 strategies for surviving the holidays

1. HIBERNATE! 

This is my favourite idea! Hide out in your quilting studio and don’t come out till the holidays are over – or better yet, when spring is in the air. If you just can’t swing this, try asking for at least one day to yourself, in your quilting studio during the holidays. Hopefully that will be enough to energize you for a while.


2.  Quilted gifts

I can hear you wondering how this is going to help you survive the holidays since this is possibly one of your major holiday stressors. My innovative idea – give the hardest to-shop-for person a quilty IOU. In a Christmas card or on a large gift tag, write down what their quilted gift will be (keep it general, small and realistic – they may actually expect you to deliver on this!)
Here are some ideas:

Make a microwavable fabric bowl

Make a fun pouch

Maybe try making a fabric basket!

Do they need a computer case?

3.  Decorating

Take out all of your Christmas quilts, runners and wall hangings and call the house decorated! If you really must have a tree, get two or three of your grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or neighbour's kids to help decorate the tree. You can get your tree decorated, feed them holiday sweets and then send them home before the sugar rush begins!

Take out all your holiday quilts

Enjoy those seasonal treasures

If the quilts are winter themed, they can stay up until spring!

Let the kids decorate the tree!

4.  Cooking 

Get yourself invited for Christmas dinner somewhere, pick up an amazing desert at your favourite local bakery and a bottle of wine. If you can’t pull this one off, consider cooking less. There are great places that make excellent food that you could buy for parts of your meal.


If you’re having people over, when they ask you what they can bring, instead of saying “Oh, don’t worry about it”, seriously consider letting them contribute. If they are really good at making something, give them the pleasure of making and sharing it with everyone.

5.  Shop the sales

While planning next year’s quilted IOU, have a glass of wine or a cup of tea, turn on (or off) the Christmas music and peruse the internet for fabrics you’ll need for that project. There are lot of sales, so make sure to pick up a few quilting gifts for yourself!

Pick up some yummy fabrics!

Find some great sales!

Follow Chevy's example!

6.  Sleep in

Even if you can't sleep in every day, give yourself permission to sleep in at least on one or two days.  If you're the type of person who wakes up at 6 am every day, consider getting up to make a coffee and then going back to bed with a great book. Give yourself permission to rest :-)

7. Pamper yourself

What is the one thing that you haven't done in ages that you used to love to do, before kids, work and responsibilities? It could be singing your heart out, dancing, going out with friends for a cup of coffee or tea or maybe even giving yourself a manicure (or better still getting someone else to give you one!) Take the time this holiday season to do something that makes you happy or makes you laugh. You deserve it!

8. Gratitude

No matter how busy or stressed this holiday season gets, remember that you are blessed with all kinds of wonderful people around you. You are also blessed with this amazing art that makes your soul sing! Be grateful for all that you have.

Gratitude makes everything better :-)

I hope that your Christmas / Holiday season is filled with love, joy, fun and peace.

Thanks for sharing this quilting journey with me,
love to all, Andrée
* This post is an update of my December 23, 2016 post "7 Ways to Survive the Holidays".

Linking parties
I'll be linking this post to many great linking parties. Let's see what's going on! GrammyDee's Themed linkup for Christmas trees and ornaments, Midweek Makers, Colour and Inspiration Tuesday, Put your foot down, Off the Wall Friday, Finished or Not Finished Friday, Peacock Party, Can I Get A Whoop Whoop?. Oh Scrap!, Slow Sunday Stitching, Monday Making, Design Wall Monday,

Free Motion Mavericks

If you have time to FMQ during the holidays, just DO IT! I'm hoping to take some time for R&R this holiday. That means a good book or two and a few quilty projects.

This is our last Free Motion Mavericks link up of 2019! The linking party will be open for two weeks and then Muv will start the new year fresh on January 2nd, 2020.

Thanks so much for linking up last time. We are starting to have a real party! This week's featured quilt is Sandra of mmm quilts' The Kelpie's Star. Sandra's quilting is amazing. I know that she uses a long arm to quilt it, but I think that she does FMQ on the long arm since she included one of Christina Cameli's FMQ design. I'm hoping that Sandra will let me know what the difference is, but no matter what, it's a really, really lovely quilt! Make sure that you check it out.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

7 Ways to Survive the Holidays

Hibernate!

Want to know the secret to surviving the holidays? These are my suggestions. BTW I can’t be held
responsible if others in your family don’t approve of these great innovative ideas!

1.  HIBERNATE! This is my favourite idea! Hide out in your quilting studio and don’t come out till the holidays are over – or better yet, when spring is in the air. If you just can’t swing this, try asking for at least one day to yourself, in your quilting studio during the holidays. Hopefully that will be enough to energize you for a while.

Winter Vacancy

2.  Quilted gifts: I can hear you wondering how this is going to help you survive the holidays since this is possibly one of your major holiday stressors. My innovative idea – give everyone on your list a quilty IOU. In a Christmas card or on a large gift tag, write down what their quilted gift will be (keep it general, small and realistic – they may actually expect you to deliver on this!) If you can’t do this for everyone, consider giving the hardest to-shop-for person a quilty IOU.

3.  Decorating: Take out all of your Christmas quilts, runners and wall hangings and call the house decorated!

Snow Globes make a great quilty IOU

Tree Skirt

4.  Cooking: Get yourself invited for Christmas dinner somewhere, pick up an amazing desert at your favourite local bakery and a bottle of wine. If you can’t pull this one off, consider cooking less. There are great places that make excellent food that you could buy for parts of your meal. If you’re having people over, when they ask you what they can bring, instead of saying “Oh, don’t worry about it”, seriously consider letting them contribute. If they are really good at making something, give them the pleasure of making and sharing it with everyone.

Take out your quilts and call the place decorated!

5.  Pamper yourself: while planning next year’s quilted IOUs, have a glass of wine, turn on (or off) the Christmas music and peruse the internet for fabrics you’ll need for those projects. There are lot of sales, so make sure to pick up a few quilting gifts for yourself!

Pamper yourself!

6.  Sleep in! Even if you can't sleep in every day, give yourself permission to sleep in at least on one or two days.  If you're the type of person who wakes up at 6 am every day, consider getting up to make a coffee and then going back to bed with a great book. Give yourself permission to relax :-)

Bandit sleeping in my fabric stash

7.  Gratitude
No matter how busy or stressed this holiday season gets, remember that you are blessed with all kinds of wonderful people around you. You are also blessed with this amazing art that makes your soul sing! Be grateful for all that you have.

I hope that your Christmas / Holiday season is filled with love, joy, fun and peace.

Thanks for sharing this quilting journey with me,

love to all,

Andrée

Winter Door Hanging

Gingerbread Mug Rug

Christmas Ball Mug Rug

I've linked to these great linky parties. Check them out!
Linky Tuesday, Let's Bee Social, Midweek Makers, Needle and Thread Thursday, Off the Wall Friday, Finished or Not Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop? I have also linked up Bandit's picture to Pets on Quilts 2017. Check out everyone's adorable pictures!

Ribbon Wreath Wall Hanging

Winter Door Hanging

Winter Door Hanging

I'm getting better....it's still winter and I finished my last seasonal door hanging! And is winter here with a vengeance today:-)

I always make up my door hangings in sections while trying to incorporate different quilting techniques. Of course, since it's my creation, there has to be lots of colour.


The first thing I did was take out my Christmas fabric stash (I hadn't taken it out yet - I wasn't in a very merry mood). I knew that I didn't want just a Christmas theme, but all of my winter fabrics with snowflakes and such are stored together. I decided that I would use the amazing blue fabric with snowflakes as my sky, so of course, a few stars had to be incorporated.

The second layer includes a couple of shapes I received at the Common Thread Quilt Guild social. I found a lovely Santa with polar bears fabric to add to the reindeer and sleigh.

All Bundled Up Snowman

Looking through my magazines, books and quilting patterns, I found a gorgeous snowman pattern called All Bundled Up designed by Kelly Mueller for The Wooden Bear. It doesn't seem to be available any more - that's really too bad.

Next to the snowman, I incorporated a winter cabin which was paper pieced from the book Quilter's Home - Winter by Lois Krushina Fletcher. I couldn't resist putting the Christmas tree in the window and of course, adding a red door. I was going to appliqué a few trees in the background when I found some lovely fabric with romping deer in a snowy forest. It was just perfect for the background.



At the bottom of the hanging, I added more abstract blocks. I had never made snowball blocks, so I incorporated two of them at one end. I had planned on hand-embroidering the snowflakes within them based on &Stitches' blog but finally I got impatient and used FMQ.

I've been wanting to make a log cabin block in dark and light fabrics for a long time. This was my chance. I adapted Block 8 - Winter Cabin from the Quilter's Home - Winter by Lois Krushina Fletcher.


Finally, the last panel is made up following Rayna Gillman's Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts technique. I've used this technique in several projects and find it most effective when the free-form quilt includes a print as a focal point. I think that so far, my best pieces using this technique are my scrappy Christmas wall hangings.

Although the photos don't really show the quilting (except for the coloured snowflakes within the snowballs and the snowflakes behind the snowman), I used this project to keep practicing my free-motion quilting skills. I echoed around the stars, the reindeer, the sleigh and the circle for the two top panels.

I quilted around the trees in the background as well as the cabin itself. For the log cabin and the free-form blocks, I practiced many of the free-motion quilting background patterns that would fit within 1½ inch strips.

What I learned:

• These door hangings are very improvisational - however, when I put the bottom panel together, I could see that my snowball blocks were too large and sticking out. I really should have reduced the log cabin block or the free-form block by an inch ....but I was too lazy to undo these three blocks. It's too bad, because it would have looked much better. 
• Amazingly enough, the FMQ snowflakes came out well - except that I really could have measured out the six branches of the snowflake. It's a good thing no 2 snowflakes are the same!

I'm really proud of my 4 seasonal door hangings. Here they all are!

Spring Door Hanging

Summer Door Hanging

Winter Door Hanging

Fall Door Hanging

This post is included in the following link-ups:

• Fabric Tuesdays

Go see what's going on in the quilting blog world!

February 10, 2015
Check out the new section on my blog: Projects from Books, Mags and Patterns. Since I learned to create new pages and a navigation bar, I am unstoppable :-) I am sooooo happy that this much fun is NOT illegal!

Finishing up Winter Quilts

I started two wall hangings before Christmas. Since they are both more about winter than Christmas, that makes them....not late! Besides, they're not late if there are no deadlines, but it is better when they are made and finished for the season they represent!

The first wall hanging is a paper piecing project from the book, The Quilter's Home: Winter by Lois Krushina Fletcher, published by Martingale. The project is the "Winter Vacancy" wall hanging. It's made up of two paper pieced blocks. The first is a snow covered birdhouse and the other is a cardinal. It's very winter and lovely.

Winter Vacancy

I just love paper piecing! I like the way it comes so well together. I'm getting better at it and more organised so that I can cut the fabric and iron it on my home-made ironing/cutting table that's right next to my sewing machine.

I still have to work on having my seams not come apart when I remove the paper from my project. I'm experimenting with stitch length. Apparently if your stitch length is shorter, it'll almost cut the paper. The problem with short stitches is obvious if you have to rip out the stitching! I'm not sure what's worse - having seams pull apart or not being able to unsew. At least when you quilt the project, especially if it's a wall hanging that won't go through the wash, the quilting will keep the project together.

This next piece is from a pattern I purchased separately from Martingale. It's Ribbon Wreath Table Topper from the book, Comfort and Joy: 14 Quilts for Christmas by Mary Hickey. I really like its clean lines and the fact that the red around the wreath looks like a ribbon going through the project.

Ribbon Wreath  Wall Hanging

As usual, since I just can't follow a pattern without making changes, there are a couple of things that I would do differently, if I ever make another one. I said that I liked the look of the ribbon going through the project, but it turns out that if you use different red fabrics for the ribbon, that it won't look so much like a ribbon (oops!).

The projects were pieced and sandwiched a while ago, but since I haven't free motion quilted in a few weeks, I just haven't had the energy to finish them. Thank goodness, that's what weekends are for!

What I learned:

• When I change the fabrics in a project, I should consider if the changes will have an overall effect on the look of the project. Having a variety of reds is nice, but it does look less like a ribbon going through the project.
• When I made an error on the size of one of the strips, I didn't think it would really make an overall difference. If I had looked at the overall project more closely at that time, I would have noticed that the corners where the red ribbons meet would be changed. It's not a big deal, but if I had taken the time to rip the seams of the strip when I discovered my error, this would have saved me a problem and more ripping out later on! I guess the moral of this story is to take a few minutes to consider the consequences of not fixing a mistake when the mistake (or design change) is discovered.
• I was very impatient to take a picture of the Ribbon Wreath project but then realized that I haven't added the buttons to the project yet. There are 24 red buttons that look like berries on the wreath. I'll add them this week and post a follow-up picture!