Snowball Quilts

A few months ago my mom signed us up for a quilting class. It was called Quilts, Food, and Fun. Here is why. We would bring food to class, each person would bring a particular dish. Then from 10am to 5pm, we were going to quilt, talk, eat, and talk some more. It was a wonderful day of fun and even learning. We got to learn a whole new technique.



The technique for this class was snowball quilts. We each had to buy our own copy of the book, for copyright laws and all. Then we could pick any design out of the book and edit the colors and fabrics as we pleased.



Mom and I discussed this for a few weeks, and we finally decided on a pattern. We also decided to be ambitious. We were going to finish 6 of these by Christmas, one for each of the aunts and an extra. Mind you, the class was just on 22 November. So that gave us about 4 weeks to have them finished and wrapped. Mom also decided it would be fun to find great large prints, and fussy cut them.



If you have never heard of fussy cutting, it is actually a technical quilting term (which I think ranks right up there with whatchamacallit) and it means to take a particular print and cut around the part that you want. So for this particular table top we fussy cut each different Santa from a larger print.



The snowball technique has one goal - make a square, plus four other smaller squares, look like a ball. You can do this in two ways. We picked the straighter way because it was quicker. So while they do not look completely round, they do look really cool.
And when put together with a few other blocks in between, you can create many different patterns. Or you could sew a bunch of snowball blocks together and just have a pile of snowballs.
These table toppers we are doing are a little more than 30" x 30". They are a fair size for either decorating the table or even laying across the back of a sofa.
And, now that we are only 2.5 weeks outside of Christmas, we still have about 3.5 table toppers to finish. Here's hoping we finish in time. ;)