A Christmas quilt done in time for Halloween Posted by Virginia "Ginnie" Leiner on October 31, 2016 at 12:30am View Blog

I know I have been incommunicato for awhile but I have been busy quilting! Here is the most recent quilt I finished just tonight, a few scant hours before Halloween. No, you are not crazy, this is a Christmas quilt. Sometimes, we just don't get to choose the timing of when things get accomplished. The pattern is your basic log cabin with cross stitched Christmas motifs in the center. The left side and upper borders are also log cabin, arranged in the lightening strike pattern while the right side and lower borders are plain strips of fabric with buttons, enameled coconut buttons to be exact which click and clack like castenets. All the buttons are sewn on but the largest buttons are also tied with 1/8 inch satin double ribbons.

As you may know, I like to say that every quilt tells a story. This story is four generations in the making. When I was a child, my father's mother, my Gramma Long, made the most wonderful gingersnap cookies. My grandparents had a lake home in The Lake of the Ozarks region in Missouri near Camdenton and I remember my granddad spreading real butter on them and eating them by the dozen in the summer time. Yes, his physique resembled Santa's and no one was really worried about heart failure back then (we should have been though). My mother, Marian Long was a great baker and she took up the tradition, making the gingersnaps every Christmas. She would make a gazillion cookies of many different kinds and freeze them in Folgers coffee cans until a day that only she knew when we could start eating the Christmas cookies. I made the gingersnaps for and with my daughters, Jamie and Becky, when they were young and they are now making them for their children and husbands. The beat (and the batter) goes on! I actually made a batch today!

So the back of the quilt tells the story as usual. I have put the only picture I could find of my gramma and I in the kitchen together with a bunch of other folks, and pictures of my three grands, Wyatt, Ruby and Sylvia. Check out the other photos of this quilt in my albums if you like.

There is a certain high I always get when I finish a quilt and this one is no different. It is 12:30 now and the hubby has been asleep two hours. I should join him I guess but I am wired. Probably too many cookies... And here is the Halloween quilt, just so you are assured I am not totally loony. Happy haunting (and quilting)!