Cabin in the snow

Hi all! With this being a holiday week and many, many of us in a cooking frenzy, it's a good time to take a small time out and share my year-end project. I have been looking forward to starting this for weeks!

The end of October until the first of the new year is the most stressful time of the year for me. Really, everything is due all at once, plus there's this major winter holiday that is a lot of fun but requires TONS of preparation. A lot of it is fun, and much of what I have to do is very rewarding, but it's also very stressful. Since the sewing keeps me sane even in the worst of times I need a year-end project that I can work on that won't add to the problem. I know a lot of people will be doing Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt, but that is just too stressful for me to take on right now. Instead, I've chosen to work on this quilt by Cindy at Quilt Doodle Doodles:

This is Cindy's quilt and her picture! Isn't it adorable?

This is such a cute quilt, and it looks pretty stress-free to assemble. Cindy has run it as a quilt-along on her blog all year. I had every intention of working along, but never did. So now that it's all finished, I'm going to do it all at once! You can buy her patterns HERE or HERE, and she has many other patterns that are very easy as well. (Go buy the pattern! You know you want to!)

This pattern generally uses same-sized squares, so I've been cutting some different dark blues to use for the backgrounds for a couple of weeks (a little at a time, you know?):

I cut up several quarter yards of dark blues with stars that I had in my stash, though most of the fabric comes from this:

Let's just call that photo "artsy," okay? This was a multi-purpose Halloween costume--witch, wizard, Merlin, etc.-- from years ago.  I know for sure it's made from quilting cotton because the selvages were still on the thing. I guess it was an emergency costume. Anyway, there were nearly 3 yards of fabric here, which got cut up and is being used as the main background fabric in this quilt. (Let's hear it for recycling!)

 And heaven knows I have a bunch of scraps for all the other colors and parts as well. No shortage of those around here!

So, I started with the cabin block, which is in the center of the quilt. Here it is:

I certainly would be happy to sit in that cabin and sew for a while, wouldn't you? It didn't come through too well in the photo, but the window there is actually yellow. Winter sunshine bleached it out pretty well. The pattern shows a brown cabin with a black roof, but I chose to use red and brown. It's cheerful, and what I had.

Cabin in the snow!

I hope everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving! I say we all lock ourselves in the sewing room and make someone else stress out over the food. If you're not in the US, I hope your week is also full of food, family, and friends! And maybe a little American football and some shopping, too.

Linking to Fabric Tuesday, WIP Wednesday, and Let's Bee Social. Happy Thanksgiving!