This pattern called for piecing an American flag as the centre portion but I knew from the start I wasn’t going to do it that way. Since my Christmas fabric was already scattered about I decided to go with a Christmas theme. Sadly it used very little of my Christmas fabric.

Had I been thinking I could have made it slightly larger with a couple of solid borders and it would have been a good size for a placemat. Since I didn’t think of that until it was too late I have found a place for it on the wall up the stairs. I guess it is the start of my Christmas decorating.

My October sew-along with Stacia and Deloise was Annette – a small and relatively easy pattern.

I’m not very good at flying geese but I used my glue baste and easy press solutions and I managed to save most of the points.

In hindsight I wish I had used the same colour of gold throughout but I was using up scraps for those 9-patches.

I did some very simple quilting as the piece is only 11.5″.

I hope this pattern is the hardest one in the book. Deloise struggled with it when it came up on her list and I know Stacia is also dreading it. It was my project for two months of sewing.

I tried to work the pattern exactly as the book said but I wasn’t able to get the Y-seams correct and everything was a mess. I salvaged what I could and tried hand sewing those Y-seams but still no luck. Anna went into the bin.

But I hated to give up so I came up with another plan. I would make the stars which, by comparison, were quite easy. The idea was then to appliqué the stars onto a background and avoid those Y-seams.

To some extent that worked but in order to get the right size I needed to trim off a quarter inch on each of the raw edges. I marked the quarter inch and used scissors to trim them.

The placement on the background isn’t quite right but it was good enough to add the border and do some dense straight-line quilting.

I was so happy to be done that I neglected to add the hanging sleeve to the back but I’ve stitched it on by hand and, hopefully, it will be strong enough to hold. I’ll hang it on my stairwell to replace one that I’m sending to Elizabeth.

Since it isn’t quite as the designer intended I’m calling this one Anna, version 2.0.

I think it is interesting to note that when Deloise was on an evacuation alert due to the forest fires her version of Anna is the only quilted project she loaded into her car!