introducing the enchanted forest quilt and embroidery patterns!

I am very happy to tell you about a collaboration between my friend Kristin of woollypetals and me. And it's called the Enchanted Forest Quilt. This quilt is filled with adorable trees: some have happy little faces, some have ornments and garlands, some have snowcaps, and lots more.

English paper piecing in my usual quilt method favorite. Traditional quilting, like this quilt uses, is less my thing because I'm not always a super precise machine sewist. But I've made an exception for this (and probably for more woollypetals quilts going forward).



If you're unfamiliar with woollypetals, let me tell you about my friend. First, Kristin is so sweet and getting to spend time with her (and our small group of sewing friends!) often helps bring about some of the ideas that keep Wild Olive going. It's a bit of a brain trust! She designs super cute quilt patterns, many of which use a lot of simple patchwork, and I always look at them and want to make them.

But I've been intimidated by all the squares. You see, I really dislike cutting all the pieces. But we'll come back to that.

So there we were, looking at these tree quilt blocks Kristen had made and our friend Faith said something like "These would be so cute with strings of lights on them!" And a collaboration was born. We almost immediately started the conversation around what it would look like for me to design a companion embroidery pattern so folks could add decorations to their trees.





I knew that lights would be a must, so there are three styles of lightbulbs in the pattern set (large, round, and small), and ornaments were the next thing we talked about. I ended up making two styles of baubles, a star, a heart, a bird, and a mushroom (which goes with the mushroom mini block in the quilt pattern!).

But I felt like this could go beyond a few motifs. The Enchanted Forest Quilt has 8 styles of tree blocks, a snowman, wonky stars, and those mushrooms, so mix and match is a big part of this.

So I created 4 garlands (popcorn and cranberries are my favorite!), some candies and a gingerbread kid, snowflakes, and presents to go under the trees. And I ended up with a 25-page pattern.

You can watch how I use the patterns in the video below. I think it's helpful for people who quilt but haven't embroidered their quilts before (at least in the way I did mine), but it's also a good way to get an idea for what you can do with the Enchanted Forest Bundle.

Now let me share a bit about the quilt part of this.

I've only done a little bit of traditional quilt making. And as I said, the cutting part always intimidates me because getting it wrong can mess up everything after that. My imprecise sewing can do that too, but that's a whole other thing. So while I wanted to make the very quilt I was designing patterns for, I was also nervous.

But Kristin showed me the special ruler she uses. It's called the Stripology XL ruler and it's so fancy! And it also made all the difference for me. I cut hundreds of squares in a few hours which would have taken me several cutting sessions without the ruler.

I got my ruler (and a bunch of the fabric I'm using on my Enchanted Forest Quilt) from Missouri Star Quilt Company. I'm a partner, which means if you use my link you'll save 15% and support my work at the same time.



Back to the quilt making. The pattern is for advanced beginners and I'm not sure if I'm very far past beginner. But because there a lots of ways to make the trees, there are options for everyone. You can make them simple (even more simple than I did) or you can add more patchwork and some foundation paper piecing (a technique I've tried exactly one time).

You can also make this with more or fewer blocks to change the size and scale of the project.

Can you tell I'm excited about this? Because I absolutely am. I'm making a quilt, I created super cute embroidery patterns (which do also work for non-quilty things), and I got to collaborate with a friend. It was so much fun.

You can find the quilt pattern alone in the woollypetals shop, the embroidery pattern alone in my shop, or until the end of the year you can get the discounted bundle in either of our shops.