After finishing up all my Christmas preparations, I felt like working on something festive. My daughter, Emily, suggested I make a Christmas quilt we could hang in the living room during the holidays. Of course, I can’t bring myself to make a quilt that’s not for some kind of bed, so it will have to be a crib or twin-sized quilt.

I thought about the vintage Christmas coloring book I posted last year when I first started blogging. It’s a “follow the colors” type book from 1964. The drawings are so cute, and I was thinking I would fill in the colors with crayon (it’s a coloring book, after all), but as I began designing the quilt, I changed my mind about the crayon and decided to just do the outlining — they are so cute just the way they are.

Some of the designs are two pages, so some of the blocks are rectangular. Actually, I had to put two rectangular blocks in each row (to make the sashing work), and there weren’t that many, so a few of the rectangular blocks I just made up by combining two coordinating pictures. The sashing squares are vintage and I have had a hard time finding just the right jewel tones — I could always add some reproduction fabric, but I’d prefer it to be all vintage. The process of prepping the squares actually takes about as long as the embroidery by the time I locate a suitable scrap — then soak, starch, draw and cut out each little square. It took me about a week to stitch this first row.

I have scanned all of the images from the coloring book and put the pdf document under downloads in my blog sidebar — just in case you want to get a start on a Christmas project for next year. The page with the shepherd and sheep is titled “The First Nowell.”

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