A Belated Christmas Present

I actually gave this present to my grandparents on Christmas day, so the only part that's belated is my posting about it. Nate and I had decided to make this a (sort of) handmade Christmas, and I wanted to make something that my grandparents could use seasonally if they didn't have room for it every day. My grandmother has a beautiful ceramic nativity set that my great-great grandmother made, so I decided to make a wall hanging that she could use as a backdrop.


You remember this quilt I posted about (since postponed due to our office/craft room being in terrible disrepair)? I actually was using the leftovers from my Christmas project for it, but I obviously could not post about the real purpose of the fabric. I chose a simple log-cabin square in a starburst pattern, to represent the nativity star:


I embellished it with embroidery, couched threads, sequins, and beads. The quilt piecing was actually very quick and easy; it was the embellishing that took a while. Here's a close-up of the work in progress:


I chose a random, completely unrelated, but cute fat quarter for the backing (it's a bit washed out in this pic):

When my grandmother opened the package, the hanging was folded up so only the back was showing, and her first reaction was "Oh, it's so pretty!" My mother had to prod her to open up the whole thing, since she was just looking at the back. I really like this fabric, and I have another fat quarter left that I want to integrate into something cute sometime soon. Sadly, I have a bad habit of not taking pictures of my finished pieces, so I can't show you what it looked like after it was quilted and bound. If my grandmother is kind enough to send me a photo of it hanging up, I'll post it.