Holiday Designs by Stash Bandit, Part 1

Written by Diane Harris on October 26, 2018. Posted in Blog, How-tos and Ideas, Quilt Lifestyle, Trunk Shows

The Nov/Dec issue of Quilty magazine is on newsstands now, and I’m very excited to have two new quilt designs inside.

Ever since I started building the Jingle Bells Trunk Show to share with quilt guilds, I’ve been obsessed with making Christmas quilts. I’m constantly working on new ideas, and these two were a fit for Quilty. You may know that magazines work months in advance, so I actually pieced these in April and May for an early June deadline.

Prancer’s Peppermints by Diane Harris, 55″ x 95″

Today I’m introducing Prancer’s Peppermints. They’re what you might call life-size—if you are a giant reindeer. This quilt is easy to piece using stitch-and-flip, and it comes together quickly. I machine quilted it on my domestic sewing machine, an HQ Stitch 710 from Handi Quilter.

The fabrics are adorable! The navy and the white are from a line called Way Up North by Jill Howarth for Riley Blake Designs. Incredibly cute and a perfect scale for this project. (In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, “scale” refers to the size of the printed motifs, or stripes, or whatever is on the fabric.)

The red print is from Bee Basics by Lori Holt for Riley Blake. I needed something a bit less active than the other prints, and this one was just right.

I love it when a fabric company establishes a line of basics and supports them for a long time. Bee Basics are really useful in so many cases! They come in a variety of wonderful colors and many read as calm, sometimes nearly reading as solids.

Prancer’s Peppermints by Diane Harris

Prancer’s Peppermints is a great quilt for a child’s bed during the holidays, or for couch cuddling during November, December and January. Christmas is special, so why not make it last? That’s my theory!

This design is long and narrow at 55″ x 95″. It’s great as a bed topper. If you wanted to make it wider to actually have a drop and fit a bed, you could make three or even four candy canes instead of just two! (That will be the topic of another blog post.)

I used to feel like stitch-and-flip was my worst enemy, but I’ve learned a few coping strategies and now I appreciate all the interesting shapes you can make with this technique. The instructions in the Quilty pattern are well written so you’ll have no trouble with this quilt, even if you’re a novice quilter. You can do it!

The Nov/Dec 2018 issue of Quilty is on newsstands now. Pick it up when you see it because soon it will be gone forever!

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Tags: candy canes, Christmas quilts, holiday quilts, quilty, stitch-and-flip