Irina Stiop sent me some pictures from her Welcome to the North Pole quilt. I’m pretty sure you will want to see all of them, but let’s start here because Irina changed the positions of the blocks to make a quilt that is more horizontal than it is square. This fits her space better. Well done, Irina!

Notice that the moon is rising in the upper left and the top backgrounds are darker. This sets the stage nicely for a night flight by Santa Claus…

Irina wrote:

I used Autocad to rearrange the layout of the quilt to accommodate my horizontal space, some dimensions had to be slightly changed.

I used a raw edge applique as my method, and fusible fleece instead of batting, because it was intended as a wall hanging. I used small zigzag to attach the pieces and changed the thread according to the colors. I then embellished every block separately, and probably got carried away, but that’s ok.

I put the blocks together, added the one piece backing and stitched in the ditch. At this point a more skilled person would do FMQ around the houses, but since Im yet to master that skill, I’ve decided to add more bling in form of pearly snowflakes, which I use to tackle down the fabric

Irina made many good choices.

• The layout of the blocks is very pleasing—I’ve not seen this before in all the years people have been making this quilt!
• The fleece batting should support the weight of the many hard embellishments without sagging. It would be hard to quilt around all these embellishments (whether by hand or machine) so it was good that she decided against that from the beginning. (FYI: you can quilt first, then add hard embellishments.)
• And the distribution of the snowflakes feels right. It can be hard to do that and make it feel balanced and random.

Thank you, Irina, for sharing your quilt with us! Scroll down to see the blocks in detail.

If you would like to make this quilt, click here to find the pattern.