Better Late than Never!

At the beginning of  October, Tisha at Quilty Therapy announced her Charming Plus QAL, and I decided I wanted to join in.  I had an idea to use some Christmas fabric I had stashed away along with low volume scraps for the backgrounds.

Then I started cutting the pieces for it!  Oops!  My main Christmas fabric to use was a charm pack of North Woods by Kate Spain for Moda.  I had cut up all of the charm squares into 4 - 2 1/2 inch squares before I realized that it takes 5 squares to make the plus part of the block and then 4 background squares.

Thanks to some encouragement from Cynthia at Quilting is More Fun than Housework, and from Tisha, I decided to keep going with one modification.  I am making my pluses out of the low volume scraps I have, and the Kate Spain Christmas charm pack has become the background.

This week, I really got going on piecing this quilt.  I sorted all of the squares by light and dark so that I could put the lighter pluses with darker Christmas fabric, and vice versa.

Then the squares for every row were laid out in their places, and I've been chain piecing them together, one block at a time.  

I've stitched up a few complete blocks, to see what they would look like, and I think it's all going to work out!

I love this one, below!  I've had this cat fabric in my stash for quite awhile.  I used it for the backing of my Scrappy Trip Around the World quilt way back in 2013.  It's so fun to find other uses for the bits and pieces of it that I still have.

Just for fun, I laid out the four blocks I've completely sewn together to see what would happen.  I like this!

I think the pluses will stand out in some blocks, but the background fabric in others.  It may turn out to be a Christmas quilt that can be out all year round!  Guess I'd better get back to work, so that I can make the link-ups Tisha has planned for finished tops and quilts in December!

Sharing at Oh Scrap! at Quilting is More Fun than Housework today.