This is your official warning!

As of today it is THREE MONTHS UNTIL CHRISTMAS DAY
TWO months until the Christmas decorations start going up

You may now all proceed to panic!

Okay stop that!

Now if you've been here for a while [ or know me in the real world ] you will just possibly be aware of a certain prediliction for the Christmas stuff ... and quite possibly you also know that I mostly run to fairly traditional Chrissy colour schemes: deep reds, burgundy, hunter greens, that sort of thing.

I used to say that I [ the queen of all things blue ] didn't go blue for christmas because
the whole [ last ] house was blue anyway, so who'd notice ?

and then, early last year I treated myself to a stunning Jim Shore Nativity Set - January Sales y'know - and it's mainly blue

It did go out last Christmas, but given that I was still recovering from some very major surgeries, the decorating was slightly scaled down [ well by my standards if no one else's ]

but now I'm back firing on all cylinders, and I've decided that what I need is a blue Christmas themed wallhanging to put over the vintage sideboard behind the Jim Shore.

Anyway, I blame OzJane.

She was the one who sent me the link to one of Stitch-N-Frame's famous [ or should that be infamous ? ] Thursday specials. This arctic Saint Nick was sooooo cheap, I had to have him
and of course I'd been merrily churning out those red and black stack & stash Japanese blocks, so I decided to make a set of 6 stack & slash stars in blues to match him.

Stack and Slash lends itself to making blocks in sets of 6,
so
I thought I'd put 3 large stars down each side of the panel

Then I did the maths and worked out that I could make a set of 6 teeny ones to be a top and bottom border and it would come out the same length as side sets of 13" ones.

We have a plan!
[ just ignore the red Japanese blocks, okay ]

Well, then the next thought was ' why not quilt each of the three panels individually and join 'em up after ? [ quilt-as-you-go]'
Followed quickly by 'Well, why not just quilt 'em and bind 'em separately ? That way I have more freedom to change the arrangement if I change the furniture."
Plus the two side sets of stars make perfectly good table runners in their own right !
So I guess we have plan version 2.0

All of the fabrics for the stars are from the stash, and I decided to go with prints that complemented the Saint Nick but which weren't actually Christmas print
... so snowflakes, stars, and pine branches all on blue.
The stash also supplied a fawn-splodges-on-cream that toned in with the panel as if they'd been designed to go together - even though all of the stash fabrics I chose were all several years, if not decades, old.
Backing and batting also from the stash . I'd be feeling positively virtuous ... if I hadn't bought about 20 metres more fabric this month

I've quilted and bound the first set of stars, so I have, in essence, a finished table runner, and because none of the fabrics are actually Christmas print, I can use it right now

so when is a finished object NOT a finished object
The aim is to have that tryptych for Christmas.
Maybe not THIS Christmas. but certainly A Christmas


Oooh decisions decisions decisions ... should I do the other set of stars next, or Saint Nick ?

oh and Nadie? I hope you don't ever decide to reclaim that navy-blue-with-snowflakes long skirt that you made in High School. I used it as one of the star fabrics and as the sashing between the blocks as well.