This week we’re going to quilt and bind our Splendid Snowmen advent calendars. (Steps 13 and 14)  If you’ve quilted before, you’ll likely feel right at home.  For those of you who are new to this type of sewing, I’ve tried to round up a good list of tutorials that will step you through the process.  The great part is, by starting on a project of this size, you’ll have just enough space to get your feet wet with quilting.  If you love it, you can go ahead and work on a bigger project.  If you don’t, no worries- this will be done soon and you won’t end up with a half quilted piece folded in your craft closet for the rest of time 🙂

As always, feel free to share your work with #SplendidSnowmen on your favorite social media site, or share your photos on our Sweetbriar Sisters Facebook page.

Preparing For Quilting

To get your calendar ready to quilt you’ll need to make up your ‘quilt sandwich’.  If you’ve never done this before, this video tutorial by Wendi Gratz explains the process beautifully.

Quilting Your Advent

Now that your quilt sandwich is all ready, it’s time you quilt your advent!  The most important thing to remember here is that you CAN’T sew your pockets closed!  We all know we spent forever putting those things together, let’s make sure we can use them. 🙂  When I quilt my advents, all of the quilting is done inside the main design rectangle.  After I’ve quilted that space, I run a stitch all along the outside edge of the Sky fabric.  This last step isn’t necessary, since your fabrics will be sewn together when you bind your advent, but I like to have the extra help keeping all 3 layers in place while I trim and sew on the binding.

If you’re familiar with quilting, consider expanding your quilting techniques by adding a new stitch or design- advent calendars are a great opportunity to try out new stuff.  If you’ve never quilted before, check out the next video in Wendi Gratz’s series for a quick start.  I’ll be adding some more quilting tutorials later in the week so you can see a few different techniques.

Also, just a little note on the buttons- I wanted my snowmen to poke out a bit, so I quilted around them but not on them.  That meant that I could sew on their eyes and buttons before quilting.  If you want to quilt inside the snowmen, wait until you’re done quilting to add the buttons or you might just go crazy sewing around them 🙂

Binding Your Advent

Last of all, we’ll bind our advents.  Again, for those of you who are new to this, I’ll add a video tutorial to step you through the process.  (I’ve also made up a little reminder image to help us all quickly remember each step of binding- you can find it here) For those of you cutting your own quilt binding, I cut mine 2.5″ wide and it worked perfectly to cover those edges of Sky fabric poking out around my pockets.

Extra Credit:  Next week we’ll be finishing our advent calendars!  Get a head start by by completing step 15- adding the hanging sleeve.