It’s Week 3 of the Island Batik Paper Pieced Celebrations blog hop and my turn to present the quilt that I made for it !

The challenge for all Island Batik Ambassadors in this blog hop was to create:

a lap size or larger quilt
a project using a paper piecing technique
a quilt celebrating your favourite holiday or celebration
a project using a specific fabric collection.

In my case, the fabric collection was The Grove, A Signature Collection for Raija Salomaa of Quilters’ Treasure Chest.

Here are all the fabrics in this gorgeous collection!

The Grove fabrics are now available in your local quilt shop that stocks Island Batik fabrics.

When considering what holiday to celebrate with this stunning fabric collection, some were automatically excluded: Valentine’s Day, Easter, Canada Day, etc. With the aqua and green fabrics, Christmas seemed the most appropriate holiday for me to celebrate - and it is my favourite holiday - so Christmas at The Grove was created!

At first I envisioned a Christmas tree and used EQ8 to draft up a few ideas. While I could’ve created several small Christmas tree blocks, I thought some presents would also be interesting (the most fun part of Christmas!), so I decided on one large tree surrounded by presents. The tree would also, of course, need a star at the top. I used one of Island Batik’s blender fabrics in yellow for the star and one of their neutral foundation fabrics, Eggshell, for the creamy background. The rest of the quilt was created using the fabrics in The Grove fabric collection.

I photographed Christmas at The Grove outdoors. I’ve altered the grass colour so that you can see the quilt top better.

The technique I used for this project was “paperless” paper piecing. With this technique, you use freezer paper to create templates for the various units of the block (there may be several). When paper piecing I often find it difficult to ensure that I have enough fabric to cover the piece on the block unit template for that particular fabric so… I printed out individual templates from EQ8 onto freezer paper as well. I could then press these templates onto the appropriate fabric, cut out the fabric, peel off the freezer paper, and then know that I had sufficient fabric to use on the freezer paper unit template. These individual freezer paper templates could then be reused as required.

Victor and Salem helping cut out the individual fabric templates

The various unit templates for the tree block.

For large unit templates, such as those for the centre tree, I printed the unit templates onto regular paper, taped them together, and then glued them to the paper side of the freezer paper.

Once the unit templates were all ready to go, I would press them to the fabric and stitch next to the freezer paper template, rather than on it as in traditional paper piecing. This meant that I could easily peel away the freezer paper template after the block unit was stitched and resuse it.

The same freezer paper template was used for all four parts of the star

There were several blocks that were repeated and I was able to use the same template for each unit in these blocks. This saved on paper and time as I didn’t have to tear away the paper from the back of the stitched block.

When using freezer paper templates, a reliable iron is so important and, while I didn’t get any photos during the construction process, my Oliso iron was really put to the test for this project. I really appreciated how quickly it would reheat when I was stitching, making the construction of Christmas at The Grove much faster than if I had had to wait longer for my iron to heat up again.

Yes, my Oliso iron makes me very happy 😄. Check out my video review of it here.

I used Aurifil thread to piece Christmas in The Grove as well as a Schmetz needle in my sewing machine.

You may’ve noticed that my photo of Christmas at the Grove is only the quilt top. Yes, I haven’t yet quilted it because of some family health issues and a vacation during May but mostly because I have lots of quilting ideas that I am still mulling over.

Here are a few of my thoughts:

stitching in the ditch - at least between blocks and maybe even inside some of the blocks
stitching a different quilt motif in each section of the centre Christmas tree
stitching ornaments on the Christmas tree - wouldn’t metallic threads be fun for this?
doing some ruler quilting in the blocks

Christmas in The Grove on our deck (which will be repainted this summer when the rain stops!).

If you haven’t yet tried paperless paper piecing, I highly recommend it. I find it less confusing than traditional paper piecing and much quicker with less waste.

This is the final week of the Paper Pieced Celebrations blog hop and, as with the other weeks of it, Island Batik is giving away two fat quarters from their latest fabric collections. Be sure to enter your details below for your chance to win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Be sure to check out my Chatterbox Quilt’s Facebook page to see all the other wonderful quilts created by my fellow Island Batik Ambassadors during this Paper Pieced Celebrations blog hop.

Also, be sure to check out the other Island Batik Ambassadors’ blogs to see what else they’re creating at:

Brenda Alburl ~ Songbird Designs

Renee Atkinson ~ Pink Tulip Quilting

Megan Best ~ BestQuilter

Pamela Boatright ~ PamelaQuilts

Susan Deshensky ~ Lady Blue Quilts Studio

Brittany Fisher ~ Bobbin with Brittany

Preeti Harris ~ Sew Preeti Quilts

Mania Hatziioannidi ~ Mania for quilts

Jane Hauprich ~ Stitch by Stitch Custom Quilting

Victoria Johnson ~ Forever Quilting for You

Connie Kauffman ~ Kauffman Designs