Day 70 – Chain of Holly Berries

Now that we’ve all totally mastered Prickly Holly, let’s stitch it up another notch with Chain of Holly Berries!

Truthfully, I actually designed this before Prickly holly, but liked the look of the holly leaves so much I figured it could become a design all on it’s own.

It just goes to show that you can take any two designs like Prickly Holly and Pebbling, combine them together and come up with a new design!

Inspiration – I really love Pebbling because the texture is out of this world, so I really use any excuse to combine it in a quilting stitch.

I’m always thinking I should try combining Pebbling with McTavishing for Spaghetti and Meatballs, or Pebbling with Paisley for a Funky Flower, or Pebbling with Stippling for Grape Vine.

The possibilities are endless! Seriously, I just thought of these three new designs while sitting here typing. Now I’ve gotta go quilt them!

…well, maybe I can wait until after I finish this post …grumble…grumble…

Design Family – Edge to Edge. Even though Pebbling is a stacking design and Prickly Holly is a chaining design, when you combine them together, you really just move from one side of the quilting space to the other.

This means that this design will work great in open areas, like sashing, but probably not so well in complicated areas like around quilting motifs.

Difficulty Level – Intermediate. I don’t think this is any more difficult than regular Prickly Holly. In fact, it might be easier because the pebbles act like a base and the holly leaves just pivot off of them.

Directional Texture – 2 directions. Because this is worked form one edge to the other, you can easily see a horizontal or vertical texture with this design.

Suggestions for Use – Okay, here’s my idea! Take this design and center the holly berries in the center of 2″ sashing. It would look just like a garland of berries!

Then have the holly leaves branch out to fill in the rest of the sashing. If you were really going for gold, you could do the holly berries in red thread and the leaves in green.

Okay, maybe that’s going a bit far, but definitely play with it in your quilts!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day

Day 69 – Prickly Holly