Just Before Dawn

The only thing I do just before dawn is ... sleep. But it won't prevent me from making a quilt by that name, designed by This & That Patterns' Sherri K. Falls.


Yes, the fabric I used is distinctly Christmas-themed, and it's May... I'd cut out the project and taken it with me on retreat last November, but barely started it. Recently, I was looking to work on a project and didn't feel like machine quilting or cutting out another project, so I grabbed this as something that I could just get going on. The pattern uses Moda's pre-cut jelly rolls; I chose Holly Taylor's Birchwood Lane and made it in the larger lap-size version instructed by the pattern (requires 3 jelly rolls!).


Overall, I'm pretty happy with the quilt, and found the directions to be relatively straightforward (you just have to watch out because the instructions vary for the two different sizes included in the pattern). Because there is so much piecing, I do wish that some ironing directions had been included; I tried to plan ahead to think about how to keep the seams abutting so that it would lie flat, but I wasn't always successful. And many of my star points are nowhere close to being nice and pointy. Most of them float, some are cut off. Not sure what happened there - perhaps the stitch-and-flip method for creating them was the culprit for me.

Here's hoping I can get this quilted and bound in time for Christmas this year. I think it'll look great hanging in our upper hallway.