10 days till d-day

Christmas decorating-day, that is. Early in the year I made a goal for myself to complete a new Christmas door banner and tree skirt by the end of December. Well, I've got the door banner top finished and ready to quilt (see this post to view), and now I'm getting down to business making my tree skirt.

I'm using a pattern from Heather Mulder Peterson's book Living Large 2 called "Starlit Evening" (see all the quilt photos from the book here). You'll need:

7 coordinating fat quarters
3/4 yard sashing fabric that forms the stars
1/3 yard setting triangles for the outside edges
and some border fabric to go all the way around (more about that later)

Initially you create strip-pieced units using the fat quarters and sashing, which are then cut at a 60-degree angle to form parallelograms. Another piece of sashing is added in the center of two parallelograms to form a diamond (you'll make 3 of these from each fat quarter), seen here:

You then cut each diamond in half:

...forming 6 equilateral 60-degree triangles, which are then pieced as half-hexagons:

Each half-hexagon will eventually be sewn together forming a full hexagon with a star embedded in it. Pretty cool, huh?  But don't sew the hexagons together just yet!  Yes, I learned this the hard way, and feel compelled to warn you not to make my same mistake ;-)

More progress to report tomorrow!