Holly's Christmas Quilt: 2 Slice Layer Cake Christmas Quilt Top

 

Holly's Christmas Quilt, 2020

I caught this video by Jenny Doan of Missouri Quilt Company, with a simple 2-slice method to make a quick quilt. out of a layer cake.  So I went on the hunt for suitable fabric collections.  With my mom gone, I know Christmas will be kind of stark (Actually, it has been for several years with her not able to decorate like usual.)

 

I chose this layer cake. Glad Tidings by Maywood.  I liked the festive colors with a hint of gold.

You need enough variety to make the quilt look scrappy, but still everything goes together.  Nothing out of place.  

If you need more direction as for a beginning quilter, Chicken Scratch offers a 10-part sew-along for the Double Slice Layer Cake pattern, showing each step of the way. 

It looks like it would have been a good one to do at Quilt Camp, where you can slam it out, and not think too much about what goes where ...   so you can keep chatting with your table-mate.  No Quilt Camp in the Year of the Pandemic, though.  So I'll be working on my own--as usual.

It came together unbelievable fast!  Now I'm working out the borders.  I picked up 2 yards of a really nice creamy frosty fabric at St Vinny's for $4.  That was the find-of-the-day!  And I have some holly berry and pine bows green scraps left over from making a giant quilted bag for my mom years ago.  I think those bags must have pre-dated the start of this blog, because I don't see a record of them here.  

  

Border Strip detail : 2 x 1 x 3 inches

The video did not say how wide to cut the border strips, and the link to the original pattern had disappeared, so I did a little bit of research and found The Golden Mean Formula (and a few other methods of calculating pleasing borders). 

Basically, you take the size of your finished block x 0.618.   In this case it was 10 in x 0.618 = 6.18 which I rounded down to 6 inches to make it easy on myself.

If you want to get really fancy and precise about fabric requirements, Quilter's Paradise offers a Border Calculator Tool. 

Cutting the Borders (6 inches wide once sewn):

• 2-1/2 inch inner strip (frosty cream)
  
• 1-1/2 inch accent strip (pine needles and holly berries)
  
• 3-1/2 inch outer border (frosty cream)

I added 1/2-in seam allowance to each strip, since I wanted the final borders to be 2-1-3 inches respectively.   I sewed the 3 borders together as a unit before adding them to the quilt center.  Sometimes, it's just easier than wrestling the entire quilt for 3 separate borders.  Because I wanted the separate strips to match in the corners, I decided the mitering would be the way to go.

Perfect Mitered Corners!

In the past, this simple task has brought me no end of frustration, but I finally found a no-fuss method that actually worked!   This was the Fons & Porter video that reminded me how to do mitered corners:

Here's an even shorter one if you just need a quick reminder of how to line up the borders to get that 45-degree angle.

Holly Rae Matucheski, 1950 - 2020

Frank and Holly's Gi-normous Quilt Top is Done!

It's done!  It took the last 3 Sundays to work up just the 9-inch borders!

It's so big, I can't even get a good picture of it.  I may have to wait until show-n-share at Quilt Camp next weekend.

 

Perfect Mitered Corners!

I decided the best treatment for the borders would be to miter them.

I sewed the borders all together OFF the larger quilt top.  It's so big, it's difficult to work with.  This tactic made it a lot easier to handle.  By my calculations, it was about 12 yards to go around this king-size quilt.  Much easier to do with shorter widths of fabric than trying to wrestle the whole quilt top with every round.

Inside view of mitered corners.

 

To my delight, this is the first time mitered corners have worked out for me!  I'd remembered seeing a demo in the Fons and Porter magazine a while back.  They explained it in a way that made sense for me.  So I tried it, and the first corner came out perfect!  So did the 2nd one, then the third. And I thought for sure the 4th one would be the problem child, but that one worked out, too!  After 40 years of sewing, I finally have mitered corners licked!

 Close-up shot of the 9-inch borders.

The pale purple and green borders are actually flanges that were folded and sewn in, so there's an added dimension there that will give the long-armer fits!

And my mom still has a lot of left-over fabric!