Exchanging Gifts

I have an actual finished quilt this week!

Okay, it's SMALL, but it's a Feathered Star, so that should count for something, right?  I made this for our local guild's annual gift exchange.  We call it the Brown Bag Challenge.  Each participant puts a fat quarter and a slip of paper with their name on it in a bag (brown or otherwise), and then chooses someone else's bag.  Then you make something with the fat quarter, and give it to the original owner at Christmas.

I got Mary L.'s bag.  Her fabric is the beautiful purple print, in the center and the points.
Long years ago, probably in the late 1980s, I took a class from Marsha McCloskey, the queen of feathered stars, and made a small quilt like this and a few more blocks.  In those days, we used rotary cutting for some of the pieces, but most of them were cut with templates.  I have no patience for templates anymore, so I wanted to find a pattern that was all rotary cut.
Here it is:  FEATHERED STAR TUTORIAL.  It's a PDF, and it's long (about 38 pages), but so worth it!  Molly, the author, takes you through each step with examples and lots of encouragement.  I would definitely recommend it.

Here's the back of the little quilt.  I used some wonderful dragon fabric I've had for years.  The designer's inspiration was an old English children's book called The Reluctant Dragon, which I love.  Some of this fabric made it into my Children's Library Quilt (which is still waiting to be quilted).
Wanna see what I got?

Mary L. had my name!  She made this lovely lap quilt.  Aren't the colors wonderful?

My fabric was this purple stripe.  I had completely forgotten which fat quarter I had put in the bag. (I pretty much do that every year, sadly.)

Check out the quilting!

And this back is absolutely beautiful.  I've been leaning this way for a while, but this clinches it.  Purple is my new favorite color.  Thank you, thank you, Mary L.!
Naturally, with the Christmas season, I've been thinking about gifts for weeks.  Just yesterday we finally finished our shopping for the grandchildren, and a week from tomorrow we'll all get together for food and fun and presents.
But I've also been thinking about other kinds of gifts.  Like the gift I'm getting today when my daughters and their children come to make Christmas cookies.  Or the gift of a Christmas card in the mail (especially the ones with photos!) or a hug from a friend.  The older I get, the more these things matter, and the less I worry about giving the perfect gift from the store.
Love is what matters.  It is, after all, the reason for the season.
Enjoy this week, if you can.  It's a gift!
Cheers,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up as usual with Crazy Mom Quilts and Busy Hands Quilts.  Come and see what everybody is making!