Holiday Charm Wreath was created as a challenge to come up with a festive seasonal quilt using charm square packs from the Lizzy Albright fabric collection that I designed for Benartex. There are no “Christmas fabrics” in the collection. Often times quilters tend to think a holiday project should have fabrics that fit that theme—and yes, that’s a great thing to do. But also, it can be like putting way too much sugar in your sweet tea…there’s a point where too much is just too much.

The lesson here is that a shape can dominate the design and the fabric choices are less important. At the time of this posting there are kits for this quilt (while they last). But you could make it with fabrics from your stash.

The inspiration came from watching my dear friend and quilting colleague, Susan Cleveland, make her wonderful Dresden plate quilts using her Prairie Pointer tool. I decided that the blade could be ‘braided’ and ‘scrappy’ and this was the result. The biggest challenge was the bow. At first it was an appliqué design. But then I realized it would cover up a lot of piecing “work” - so I opted to find a way to incorporate the bow into the piecing. The only appliqué in this quilt is the center bow circle - placing the larger center wreath circle over the wreath - and the four corners.