Pockets full of blessings, a wall quilt

“When you’re worried, and you can’t sleep, just count your blessings instead of sheep, and you’ll fall asleep, counting your blessings,” sings Bing Crosby in White Christmas, one of my all-time favorite holiday movies.

That movie, and that silken voice, were the inspiration behind Pockets Full of Blessings, a wall quilt that can be used as an Advent Calendar to countdown the days until Christmas, and a hold-all for various things throughout the rest of the year. Use it to help organize a sewing room, office or dorm room.

It’s all about the pockets.

Let’s get started collecting up what you’ll need for this project:

2 packages of 42 charm (5″) squares

1 yard backing fabric

1/2 yard border fabric

1 yard cotton quilt batting

thread: all purpose and machine embroidery

needles: machine quilting and embroidery, hand-sewing

Unique flexible thimble

Heirloom finger pressing tool

chalk marking pen

Heirloom scissor snips

TrueCut rotary cutter and ruler

Sew Smooth

24 buttons

HeatnBond Feather Lite

applique press sheet

24 metal rimmed key tags (I found mine in an office supply store)

rubber number stamps

stamp pad

baker’s twine

wooden dowel

Normally, I like to wash, dry and press all my fabric before I start a project. With charm squares, this just isn’t possible.

I like these little pre-cut squares, offering all the patterns in a particular line of fabric. They’re fun to collect. Often, they offer good value when you really love a particular line of fabric, but can’t decide which fabrics in the line to buy. They’re are also easier to store than fat quarters. I keep mine in re-purposed wooden wine crate, discovered for $3 at a local thrift store.

For the Pockets Full of Blessings wall quilt, we are going to use 75 of the 84 squares in our two packages of squares.

You’ll also need additional squares to create the hanging pockets for the wall quilt, as well as the label.

I’ll leave you now to go gather up the supplies. Come on back tomorrow when we begin to count our blessings with sweet little pockets of charm.