Christmas Quilt

'A cup of tea, a mince pie and maybe a Christmas song or 2, a little Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas always puts me in a happy Christmas stitching mood!' As Janine is not a quilter she has designed this quilt to make it as flexible as possible for you to make and leave you free to quilt as you would like. You will then learn some of the techniques Janine uses with the images to appliqué, draw and write onto fabric. She will show you how, and help you, to draw, design and use the images to make a stitched picture quilt or you may want to make panels and use them to make place mats, pictures, Christmas cushions etc... Her printing, drawing and  sewing style is very relaxed, easy and free and very quickly you will be able to achieve a lot. You can also experiment with some hand embellishing and embroidery whilst keeping to a very neutral Scandinavian colour palette which she uses or create your own.

Janine has a new quilt ready for the workshop.

A Nisse (Denmark, Norway) or Tomten (Sweden) is a humble household sprite that will look after your house or farm in the weeks running up to Christmas. They are very important and take care of the livestock and animals that winter on the farms. Please don't offend them by offering them smart clothing or they will get ideas above their station and leave you to do all the work yourself. It is also very important that you offer your Nisse a bowl of porridge on Christmas Eve which must have a large pat of cold butter in it so it will melt slowly and he can see it, because if he thinks he's been done out of his butter pat he will throw quite a tantrum! Although they are now quite keen on the ris a l'amande which is a sweet rice pudding made with almonds and whipped cream served on Christmas Eve. 

I was brought up with them, from December 1st when they would descend from the loft Christmas was never Christmas without them around the house but we had to respect them because if we offended them they could cause such chaos you could run the risk of the cat leaving home.

So the new quilt for this year is a collection of happy, humble, hard working, Nisse folk for you to hang in your house and as they would say, God Jul (Happy Christmas) 

Student requirements

• sewing machine, feed dogs down and embroidery foot.
• sewing kit
• pencil and paper
• selection of fabrics
• main white fabric, you could use vintage linen or calico
• interfacing/vilene 
• wadding/batting                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
• backing fabric                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
• thread, grey/black/red