Christmas in July :)

As this is a quilting and sewing blog, I try to keep things such as religion out of my blog and I have no intention of getting into my current beliefs here. 🙂  But, I feel a bit of history is necessary here. I was raised Muslim and incidentally we are right in the middle of my favorite time of the Islamic calendar, Ramadan. It is known as the Muslim holy month of fast but, it is much more than that. A time for self improvement and realignment and if it’s done in earnest can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. And in just a few days Muslims around the world will celebrate the close of that month with one of the two major Muslim holidays of the year, Eid ul Fitr. This was our major gift giving/celebration time of the year growing up. It is a wonderful, giving, festive, celebratory time but, it doesn’t traditionally include decorations like Christmas.

As a Muslim I wasn’t raised celebrating Christmas. But, always the creative before all else I always thought it would be fun to be able to decorate for Christmas. I’ve always loved Christmas decorations!

I live with and help take care of my 92 year old grandfather and Christmas is also my guy’s favorite time of the year so of course I seized the opportunity to decorate for Christmas last year! This is not meant to be offensive to anyone as I recognize the religious significance and importance to those that it is meaningful to. But, for me it is not religious. It is a time to celebrate family and love and to share with them something that is significant to them. So, I picked colors that reflected my family. My guy is red-green colorblind so I knew that I had to decorate in more colors than that. And my grandfather is visually impaired so it needed to be bright with a lot of contrast. So, I picked a palette of navy, red,  yellow, and green against white. It sounds very primary color-ish but, turned out to be festive and pretty. And my theme was Gumdrops.

So, I made a couple of simple stockings. Blue for my guy. Green for me as it’s my favorite color. And Red for Grandpa.

And, a Gumdrops tree skirt.

And, Gumdrops placemats with jingle bell napkin rings for our adjoining dining room. My grandfather likes a formal table. 🙂

I wanted a Christmas quilt so I made my second text quilt. (I’ll post tomorrow about making your own text fabric!) It features “Twas the Night Before Christmas” which is safely in the public domain unlike my first text quilt (more about that tomorrow). 🙂 Note how the text “spills” off the sides of the quilt.  The backing is my favorite ever Lotta Jansdotter print Woven from the Echo line in Navy to coordinate with the blue text on the front.

I’ve always loved snow globes so there was a snow globe. Thanks Target.

And a few ornaments including fabric covered Styrofoam balls, dollar store nutcracker and snowflake ornaments decorating the presents and a fun wreath also from Target.

Merry Christmas in July and an early Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends!  🙂  Maybe next year I’ll post on time. Maybe.

XO

Latifah