A Sunday Well Spent – Seasonal Quilting

It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks. Between the kids, extracurriculars, hunting season, work, and now the inevitable fall germ invasion, I hadn’t really taken time or found much inspiration to start a new project…or work on one of the several that I’ve already got going. It’s like crafting ADD and always working on a PhD (projects half done).

This weekend, suddenly uncommitted, thank you to the aforementioned fall germ invasion, so I sent myself to the hibernation den and decided to work on something. It required minimal energy output, and I’m mostly in seclusion, aside from the little orange cat we call Bob, who thinks my space is his space.

Saturday, I spent the majority of the day bouncing between the couch and my quilting machine, working on a top that I had finished some time ago. Apparently, time has really moved quickly because I thought it was an early 2025 top finish, turns out it’s actually from February 2024.

When I woke up this morning and had the itch to create, and it HAD to be something festive and seasonal. Seasonal sewing is one of my favorite things. I thought about getting into the Christmas projects, but we haven’t quite got to Thanksgiving yet, so I couldn’t fully commit to all-out Christmas everything. (I’ve already got one finished Christmas quilt that I whipped up in about a week for my upcoming class).

I decided on a Thanksgiving Table Topper, with a turkey, leaves, acorns, and a pumpkin. Off to the hibernation den again to get something started, with a couple of small restrictions.

• Do not purchase anything new. That won’t be a problem, my LQS is 30 minutes away and they’re not open on Sunday!
• Do I have any Thanksgiving project patterns?! Nope. Looks like we’re making one!
• Not a full quilt, something that can be mostly completed today.

How the day went: Spent 2ish hours in EQ8 designing blocks, sifting through my scrap buckets to find coordinating fabrics, and mentally assembling the pieces for the least amount of cutting and short sewing (1 1/2″ blocks, anyone?!). Moved on to arranging colors, cutting and sewing for several hours, starting with the tedious, smallest squares first, and saved the most challenging construction pieces for last, I lost count.

At the end of the day, I had a completed topper, some rough instructions to use later in pattern writing, and even found the perfect piece of orange fall-themed, leaf and acorn print that was almost the exact size I needed in a different scrap basket.

🌻🧵