It is nowhere near close to Christmas yet, but this tree skirt is my favorite finish from my UFO pile yet.  And actually, it’s the very last of them… I’ve officially worked through every half-finished project that’s been plaguing my conscience for the last 5 years!  (One of them was actually taken apart instead of finished… but I’ll get to that some other time.)

You may remember (but probably don’t) way back in 2010 when I started this tree skirt.

I took a class at my local quilt shop (LQS) and had grand plans of starting a holiday tradition of dressing every tree with this tree skirt… and then I got stuck. I could not get past the dreaded “quilt and bind as desired” because I had no method at all, let alone one that I desired!

And let me tell you… while I’ve improved in a lot of areas since then, binding is still my nemesis and bias binding on SO MANY CURVES is exactly what kept this at the very bottom of my UFO pile all these years.  Every once in a while I would get an itch to finish and would start Googling for tutorials… but it just looked too daunting. Since I’ve been on a roll lately, I decided to take another look at the printed instructions and power through. Lo and behold, the tree skirt was not meant to be quilted OR bound, but simply turned.  It was just my LQS that wanted to quilt it as part of the class… and then after the top was completed in class, I never learned how to actually finish it. It’s an understandable impulse since they’re a quilt shop… but… it’s a shame that an unnecessary step held me up for four years!

Luckily I hadn’t gotten much further than laying out the quilt sandwich and basting, so I removed the basting and batting. I still wasn’t excited about all the curves, so I changed the shape into triangles which made all the difference.

With a good podcast in the background, I finished it up in a couple hours… with NO quilting and NO binding. Hallelujah! You can bet this skirt will be gracing our tree this year… and I’ll get some better pictures.

But I was too excited to share this finish to wait for a photo op!