Lone Star templates quilt a Christmas tree skirt

I had promised my nephew and wife a tree skirt way back in 2011 – oh dear, that’s a few years ago now. Finally I’m getting around to fulfilling that promise of a quilted skirt for the Christmas tree which takes up a large chunk of their living room. Needless to say this tree skirt will need to be a little larger than normal. No point putting a teeny tiny skirt under the tree if it will never be seen and besides the cat needs a comfy place to lie before the presents all arrive.

Collecting the bits and pieces as well as the fabric is always one of my favorite parts of the quilting process. There are so many wonderful tools, notions, threads and gadgets to enhance our quilting process and projects.

I found these templates at my LQS and of course had to have all three sets as it was too hard to choose between circles, hexagons, parallelograms and triangles. I do love geometric shapes. How about you? Which is your favorite?

I decided to go with the triangle shape to make a Lone Star tree skirt. Using the lone star shape will make it easy to cut the quilt to become a tree skirt, plus it will be a simple yet elegant design. I haven’t done a lot of quilting with templates so I’m looking forward to using the Clover Trace’n Create quilt Lone Star Collection templates.

Picking the fabrics for any quilting project is a lot of fun! It’s like opening up a box of crayons and choosing the colors that inspire you most at the time.

In this case the colors white and gray are definitely in this color palette, since they decorated their house in gray, black and white. I decided to add red to represent the Christmas season and therefore adding some cheer at this time of the year.

I pulled out these fabrics that I had leftover from another project that I did earlier this fall. They are from 3 different fabric lines but they go together beautifully.

In the end, I only want to have 3 fabrics in the quilt so I put together different combos of the above fabrics and took a picture of each to see how they looked together. Taking a photo is a great way to audition fabrics because it gives a perspective of distance and how the fabrics interact together.

I also wanted to have differing values of fabric – a light, medium and dark – by using these 3 different values in the quilt there will be good contrast between the fabrics and the design will ‘pop’ right off the quilt.

I narrowed down the choices. Both have the red and dark gray but the background fabric is of the same design just a different color – one is white with gray swirls and the other is gray with gray swirls.

Fabric combo #1 – red, dark gray & white with gray swirls

Fabric combo #2 – red, dark gray & light gray with gray swirls

After auditioning and comparing the fabrics I narrowed it down to the 2 combos above and after much contemplation I decided to go with fabric combo #1 – the red, dark gray and white swirl fabrics. I find that the dark gray pops the gray swirls out in the white fabric better than in the gray fabric which will make for more contrast and more wow factor in my quilt.

These 3 fabrics are going to make a fabulous tree skirt! I love the different textures in each fabric and how they interact so well together.

Gathering up the rest of my supplies I’m ready to get started on this not so little project.

Join me tomorrow to see how easy it is to make the lone star center of the quilted skirt for the Christmas tree. Happy Quilting!