Peppermint Pines

I had dabbled a little with quilting and sewing before but this past February my mom and I went to a quilt show and I got bit by the quilting bug. I purchased a kit at the show (more on that later) and then I started looking around online and found an entire world of women my age who were quilting and making amazing things with all of these great designers (some of who I knew from my love of scrapbooking). It was amazing to see and I immediately got sucked in and started ordering fabric and piecing tops. My mom gave me some of her back issues of Easy Quilts and I pieced a quilt top for one of my coworkers who was expecting (it still needs to be quilted, oops. All of that to say when I saw Peppermint Pines by Barbara Campbell I immediately thought of my sister in law and her love of all things pink and knew it would be a great Christmas gift.

So began my search for the fabric. Seeing as how this was a December 2008 magazine and it was not March 2009 the wonderful Poodles Noel Collection by Jersey Girls was hard to come by. I managed to track down all but one of the fabrics and I found an alternate to replace that one. But in the original she used the plaid fabric for the outside boarder and the middle tree. I had found a strip which was fine for the boarder but there was just something about that tree. I googled day after day trying to find this fabric. Finally I saw that SFO had made a quilt out of this fabric. So I wrote her and asked if she had any scraps I could purchase. As luck would have it she had a few 5 inch squares of the plaid left. Not perfect but better than what I had which was nothing. And because she is so sweet she sent them to me. How amazing is that. This was my first introduction to how wonderful online quilters are and their willingness to bend over backward to help out a fellow quilter.

It's still a work in progress as I need to machine stitch around everything and still sew the boarders but well since I have a blog I figured I might as well post something. But here it is the start of my own Peppermint Pines. Now I just have to hope my SIL doesn't read this between now and Christmas Eve.