Ready Set Snow - A New Hope

Some quilts just sort of... come together. Others don't. This is the story of one that didn't.  My original inspiration for this quilt was a kit I saw at a local quilt shop:

I liked the bright colors and thought the separation by horizontal lines added a fun pop to an otherwise pretty simple quilt: unfortunately, by the time I had convinced myself to run back and buy it a few weeks later, they had already sold out. But, I was not to be deterred. I started watching for collections with those black horizontal stripes like I liked.

It didn't take long before I realized that Ready, Set, Snow from the same line ALSO came with fabrics with horizontal stripes - in three colors to be exact. After some back and forth-ing, I decided to order myself a layer cake, and recreate the pattern for my first Christmas quilt.

I'd seen it in stores and liked the fun, playful design and the addition of blue as a Wintery but not-quite-Christmas-cliche color. Of course, by the time I cut into it, I'd forgotten the details of the inspirational pattern a little. Here's what my blocks looked like:

Notice that now the blocks do not change fabric across the stripes, and that the stripes now come in all different colors.  I arranged my blocks according to a pattern I liked, and then sewed them together. So far so good.

But then came the challenge of... the border. I knew that the blocks alone would finish just a LITTLE small for my tastes as a "throw it over the couch and use it to keep warm while you watch TV" quilt, so I'd already invested in a yardage of the white-with-red-snowflakes to use as a border. But as soon as I put it on, I knew that was a mistake - the other snowflake prints on the outside blended into it so that their blocks disappeared, and it just... didn't have the effect I was going for AT ALL. Even my normally-very-forgiving husband was like "...is that actually what you're using for the outside color?" For the record, this was in July.

I am not proud, but at the time Spookyville was on the horizon with a baby-shower deadline looming, so I decided it was best to just... let this one age a bit before coming back to it. Four months later, no less than 4 quilts have been pieced - and three of those completed in their entirity - in the time it took me to get close enough to Christmas to feel obligated er, brave enough to come back to this thing. Now my goal is to have it completed by Christmas. Please stay tuned for part 2: the Sashing Strikes back.