H-A-P-P-Y-H-O-L-I-D-A-Y-S

I hate empty walls, like this one. This is where the Chicken quilt usually hangs, but it hits the floor, and my cat Millie likes to hide behind it, and the back gets covered with cat hair, so I took it down.

But it's the holidays and I thought it would be fun to make a holiday quilt to grace this wall. I won't get it finished and quilted before Christmas, but so what?  The first thing was to figure out what I wanted. Some things were obvious. No Santa, no snowmen, no applique, nothing cutesy. 

Then I remembered a story my Mom used to tell me. When I was a kid, we had a small wall hanging with a pocket for Christmas cards. On the pocket were the words "Happy Holidays." Apparently when I was four years old I asked my grandfather... "Pepere, what does H-A-P-P-Y-H-O-L-I-D-A-Y-S spell?"

 So I decided my Holiday Quilt had to have those words. I decided the words would be in red fabrics on WOW (white on white) fabrics, and that I'd make one letter out of only one fabric. Here are the fabrics I picked.

I wanted to make the dot of the "i" a mini asterisk flower. It's not exactly easy because the asterisk has a lot of seams.

I didn't really hit my stride with these letters until I got to the A. Looking at this word, I felt the O-L-I-D didn't really fit with the rest.

So I took it apart, and remade those letters. The letter D, both in uppercase and lowercase, d, is my LEAST favorite letter to make. I'm not overly excited about this one, but I can live with it.

The new little robotic rug sucking monster is going to have a good time when I let it loose in the studio, although I will pick up the larger pieces first.