paper pieced Santa | NW Quilted Cat

Continuing on my Santa and mini-quilt kick, I’ve created another simple project using Carol Doak’s pattern. The Santa block is a small, 3-inch paper-pieced pattern that you can obtain if you join her online Yahoo group.

I really like this little pattern because it comes together very quickly and you can use scraps from your stash. I made this particular project as a Christmas gift for my mom. She has one Christmas tree that she decorates each year just using Santa ornaments! (Mom, if you’re reading this, just act surprised when you open this gift!).

I started out with 5 little Santas, but decided to use just 3 of them.

Here are the 3 little Santas up-close:

Primitive Santa 1

Santa 1 has a dark blue background with a white snowflake print in the foreground. The dark blue sky has little white dots for snowflakes.

Primitive Santa 2

Santa 2 has a black background with a printed word foreground featuring names of Santa’s reindeer. The black sky also has white snowflake dots, but I didn’t fussy cut it well enough to display them!

Primitive Santa 3

Santa 3 has a white-on-white background with a grey foreground. The white background has white snowflake dots, but my camera didn’t pick them up very well.

All the Santas have embroidered eyes and noses using black DMC embroidery floss.

I then added a 1.5 inch inner green border around all 3 Santas. The outside border is black with silver snowflakes and measures approximately 2.5 inches. The binding is the same green fabric as the inner border. I used my regular sewing machine to stitch around each Santa block in the green border and to stitch around the 3 blocks in the outer border.

Completed 3 Primitive Santas

The backing fabric is also a black snowflake print but features white snowflakes rather than the sparkly, silver ones. I need to save the sparkly fabric for other Christmas projects!

Since I don’t have an embroidery machine, I wasn’t sure what to do for a quilt label. Normally, I make labels at my mom’s house, but that would give away the surprise! Instead, I used another one of Carol’s little 3-inch blocks, a snowman, to make the label. Check at my earlier post here on the snowmen.

I hand-embroidered my wording onto the snowman block and then added a border using the backing fabric. I then stitched it down to the backing.

Here’s the whole back:

Primitive Santa Backing

Here’s a close-up of the snowman label:

Snowman Label

Happy Paper Piecing!
~Jennifer~

I’m participating in a mini block exchange for the holidays. I’ve come down to the wire as the blocks are due to the swap hostess next week! I managed to carve out a little bit of time after work this week to make 4 mini Santa blocks. These are different Santas than shown in my earlier post here.

Carol Doak designed these as well and just posted them as Christmas Ornament blocks for her Yahoo group.

Here are the 4 blocks together:

Mini Santa Blocks

These blocks actually have a 1/2 inch seam allowance so the can easily be used in these keepsake frame cards:

Santa Card

The Santa faces looked a little blank so I added small brown eyes using embroidery thread. I’ll leave any other embellishments up to the individual receivers. But, wouldn’t the Santa look cute with a miniature white pom-pom at the top of the hat?