Christmas in July quilt top reveal

Sometimes when you go into a fabric store a line just grabs you. And that’s what happened to me when I spotted Holiday Frost by Jan Shade Beach for Henry Glass & Co., Inc.

I picked up one panel, two yards of the red snowflake, one yard of the silver snowflake and one and two-thirds yards of the snowy plane that behaves like a stripe. My only plan was to somehow expand the panel to make it square and then use the snowy scene as a final border.

To keep this quilt as fast and easy as possible, I decided to keep the fabric panel intact and build out from there, almost like a medallion quilt. The panel measured 21 by 39 inches, so I made all my borders divisible by three so the math would stay as simple as the panel.

First I added a three inch red strip to each side of the panel gave me the width I needed to fit five, nine-inch blocks on the top and bottom borders, which also gave me the height I needed to make the quilt top square.

I chose a shoe fly pattern for the nine-inch block because I wanted something easy to go with the rest of this simple quilt. I alternated the placement of the red and silver to give it some extra visual interest without getting too complicated.

Not all borders deserve to be mitered and considering my goal was to make this quilt as simple as possible, you’d think I would just go for a a regular border treatment. But I just love the way striped fabric looks when it comes together on a 45 degree angle. This fabric fit that description, so I went for it and I’m very pleased with the results.