Holiday Homies by Tula Pink

When I first saw Tula Pink's new Holiday Homies fabric few months ago, I just couldn't resist.

I'm not usually one for cute images on fabric, and I don't even like dogs all that much, but the combination of dogs with glasses and Christmas sweaters, just drew me in.

I bought a fat quarter bundle and decided to made a small Christmas quilt, fussy cutting the images to retain as much of them as possible.  It's summer time when it's Christmas here in New Zealand, so we don't need big Christmas quilts - but I still like to put out some decorative table runners and hang some wall quilts.

I really liked all of the fabrics that came in the Holiday Homies collection, so I decided to incorporate them all into my quilt.

When the top was finished I hand quilted it with Aurifil 12wt.  As usual, I used a range of colours - some matching and some contrasting.  If you're new to my blog and want to know more about how I hand quilt, you can check back to these three posts I wrote earlier in the year:

Celebrate Hand Quilting

Hand quilting threads

Hand quilting designs

I'm not one to write patterns usually, but if you'd like to make a Holiday Homies quilt similar to mine, here's what I did.

1.  Fussy cut the animal images very carefully to preserve as many as possible. I drew 4.75" squares on the diagonal on the back of the fabric, centering the images and carefully managing the lines between adjoining animals. Take your time doing this.

2. Cut 2 x 4.25" squares for the corners of each animal block. Cut these square in half on the diagonal to make 4 90 degree triangles.

3.  Sew the triangles to the squares to make the animal diamonds into square in a square blocks and trim them to 6.5" x 6.5".

4.  Add borders.  Cut 2 strips 6.5" x 2" and attach.  Cut 2 strips 9.5" x 2" and attach.

5.  Choose a plain fabric for the final border.  I tired without a plain border and it was just too busy. Cut 2 strips 9.5" x 1.25" and attach.  Cut 2 strips 11" x 1.25" and attach.

6.  Make sashing by joining 2" strips and trimming to 3.5". I kept mine this wide because I wanted to incorporate my remaining animal prints in the cornerstones. You could make the sashing narrower if you don't have any animals left over.

7.  Make cornerstones from the remaining animal images if possible.

8.  Join it all up and you have a fun quilt for children (and children at heart) to admire at Christmas.


My finished quilt measures 37.5" x 37.5" and was all made from fat quarters - if you buy fat quarters you need to be sure that your local quilt shop cuts the animal images carefully. Nothing worse than coming home with half a dog!

Merry Christmas.