I originally planned this quilt to be part of my Holiday Mart inventory. Of course, when push came to shove, I couldn't get it all finished in time, and no one wants to buy a quilt top these days. 

I did end up finishing it, about a week after the Holiday Mart.

This is the first quilt I've ever completely designed on my own, start to finish. I went with a strip quilt design, because it seemed like something even I couldn't screw up. I've learned that quilting is really just the bastard child of geometry and sewing. Since I failed geometry, you can imagine what most of my quilts end up looking like. Suffice to say there's usually a lot of improvisation to keep things from looking too much like an impressionist painting.

This one, I think I would have been okay but for my forgetting different lengths of strips = different amounts of seam allowance added to the overall row width. Which explains why my tree is kind of short and fat and looks like something from a ColecoVision game.

I will say, however, that star? Probably my absolute best applique stitch EVER. Yay, ME!

I used a combination of cotton holiday prints for the front, some gold satin for the star, and various ribbon scraps on the gifts. The backing is a "snow" white Kona cotton, and the whole thing is bound in red. 

After I finished it, I wasn't sure what to do with it. There are too many little imperfections for me to want to sell it in my Etsy shop (I still suck at machine binding). I thought about giving it to someone as a gift. But the more I look at it, the more I want to keep it around. I think I'm going to sew some buttons on the tree, sew some hanging loops along the back, and put it on our living room wall. And if I ever finish the Advent calendar I'm making for us, the boys can hang mini ornaments on it each day.

But yeah, I think I'm definitely keeping it. I didn't do all that math just to give it away. :P