O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree!

Um...I have a confession...

...I LOVE Christmas.  More than anything else.  Okay.  Except coffee.  I REALLY love coffee, but I digress.

I look forward to the Santa Claus parade every year because that's the day CHFI begins to play Christmas music 24 hours a day.  Christmas lights make driving anywhere loads of fun, everything in public looks a lot prettier all jazzed up for the holidays, people are nicer, and I get to buy peppermint mochas at starbucks.  Yippee!

This year, I am making two (yup, still determined to make a matched pair) Christmas Tree quilts.  I was home sick for a chunk and so I was able to get some work done on them in between napping and wanting to rip my own ears off to escape the pain of my sinus infection.

Remember this?

This was one of TWO piles that needed to be sewn.

 Well, over the course of the last week, they became this:

Pieces, ready to be sewn together to make 48 tree blocks

Getting all those pieces into tree shapes got to be highly repetitive and mindless.  I settled into a rhythm of sew, slice, press, sew slice, press some more...all while I rocked out to Christmas jams on my radio.  Epic.

This was the step I began to loathe the most.  I cut 384 stooooopid corners off these tree parts.  384!  I have slicer's thumb.  It's for real.  Trust.

And I can admit, I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and neat when I sew, but after 384 corners, I was tossing ready to press tree-bits in a gigantic pile.  There was no neatness happening.

Veritable fabric flinging

But before long, progress was palpable.  Trees began to take shape and I began to get super excited.  I really love the fabric I used.  Its Blitzen by Basic Gray for Moda and I would coat my whole house in it if I could.  So pretty soon this....

...became an official forest!  And once I got to that point, I couldn't stop.  I had to see this thing through!  

Two finished rows of trees - or, as I like to think, half my trees finished!

And soon enough....

Sooooo happy!

Close up - notice how the rows are slightly off-set?  Love it!

The intention is for these to become a couple of Christmas gifts so I can't lose any of my momentum or excitement or I might not get them completed in time.  I aim to have the tops done by the end of this weekend.  It may be a lofty goal and I might, in fact, not achieve it.  However, the pieces for the second top are finished and after I lay it out, it feels like it goes together pretty quickly.  Then I have to get the backings together and.....yikes....the quilting!  I feel like I just want to do a looser loop-de-loop all over both tops.  I hypothesize that doing that will speed up the whole process - but I may just be crazy.  And a bonus - binding it doesn't scare me so much any more.  I think I'm getting faster and once winter sets in, I can huddle under the quilt while I bind it.  Score!