Stitch It for Christmas: Festive Sewing Projects to Craft and Quilt

Introduction

Christmas for me is a special day in the year when my family gathers to enjoy good food, laughter and to exchange gifts and hugs. As we gather together for Christmas dinner the air is filled with the wonderful aroma of a traditional dinner cooking. There are twinkling lights on the tree and our home is decorated with many of my handmade treasures. I hope this book will give you some inspiration to create treasures of your own to celebrate this wonderful time of year.

I absolutely adore designing for Christmas, whether it’s a small stitched gift for a friend or something bigger, such as a festive wall hanging for my family. Combine this with the fact that I am working with my own fabric collection and suddenly the projects take on a whole new feel of Lynette Anderson. Enjoy your Christmas stitching!

Creating the projects for this book has been a lot of fun. I started with Christmas stockings but snowmen, fir trees, stars, sleigh rides and cute reindeer quickly followed. There is a useful mixture of gifts and keepsakes for you to create, including a pillow, placemats and napkins, a wall hanging, tree decorations and a lovely table centrepiece. All of the projects are easy to create, with stepped instructions and diagrams to help you. The templates for this eBook can be found at www.stitchcraftcreate.co.uk/patterns [URL inactive]

With a festive mix of patchwork, appliqué and stitchery the delightful projects in this book will help you create a Christmas to remember, with keepsakes you will want to bring out year after year. And my favourite project? No contest – I love them all!

General Techniques

This section describes the basic techniques you will need to make and finish off the projects in this book, from transferring designs to binding a finished quilt. Beginners should find it very useful.

Sewing and Pressing

Patchwork or pieced work requires accurate seams and maintaining an accurate ¹⁄4in (6mm) seam allowance will give the best results. For really accurate piecing sew a bare ¹⁄4in (6mm) seam, as this will allow for thread thickness and the tiny amount of fabric taken up when the seam is pressed.

Generally, press seams towards the darker fabric to avoid darker colours showing through lighter colours on the right side. Press joining seams in opposite directions so they will lock together nicely and create the flattest join. Press (don’t iron) and be very careful with steam as this can stretch fabric.

Joining Strips

Sometimes you will need to join fabric strips together to make them long enough for borders or binding. Joining them with a diagonal seam at a 45-degree angle will make them less noticeable, as will pressing the seams open, as shown in the