Decorating the Christmas Tree

It is sort of traditional in our household to start the Christmas decorating on the first weekend in December. Accordingly I have erected the Christmas tree, but I am going to leave it unadorned for just 10 days as our only Australian based daughter wants to come home to help decorate it as was the custom in the past. I can hardly wait to see her again and to decorate it and the rest of the house - well the main rooms anyway. Aaaah. those 10 days are going to seem forever!!!

Part of the reason I wanted to get the tree up was that I made a Christmas Tree Skirt this year. It is something I have wanted to do for years, but never got around to it. It is a gorgeous ruffled version and it was much more fiddly than I expected: getting all those gathers sewn up without the under skirt being caught up was the main problem. My quick unpick in indispensable, I must have unpicked maybe a metre at least. I did consider hot gluing it but  decided against it as I want to be able to use it for many, many years, and hot glue does lose it's effectiveness after a few years, plus one tutor said that it was such a hassle, that she may have gone faster had she sown it... obviously she wouldn't have run into my problems!

Now that it is finished I can show you this for now. I think it looks fantastic. I made it in multiple colours as I wanted to use up the fabrics I had on hand with the exception of the red and white striped fabric which I bought specifically since the outside frill needed more fabric than what I had on hand.

Tutorials used

For the ruffled skirt I followed the excellent tutorial on Prudent Baby except I just cut a circle for the centre hole as I pop it over the tree base before I put the rest of the tree together.

I made my own continuous biasbinding using this tutorial found on Dread Pirate. Shelley Rodgers goes into a lot of technical stuff including how to calcalate how much material you'll need. Also look around her site. She has so many quilts that she has done, she is amazing.

Have you made anything for Christmas this year?

Please link to it in the comments and I will take a look as some of my readers are likely to do as well!