Handmade Christmas#2 ... with a little help from my friends

Once upon a time there was a little princess who lived in Los Angeles, and she travelled all the way across the Atlantic in a brown paper envelope.

But when she arrived, the foolish English lady in wanted to put her in a cold hard frame on the wall. The princess was too polite to object, but she looked a little bit sad, and when the lady looked closer, she knew that the little princess really wanted to be snuggled up in a cosy quilt on a bed just like the one in her picture - though perhaps with not quite so many mattresses, and fewer under-bed vegetables.

The little princess was pleased, and she used her most serious look, and clasped her tiny painted hands together as if to say 'these are my colours - can you match them?'. 

And luckily the lady had been collecting fabric scraps since before the dawn of time, and had a whole plethora of pinks and greens and oranges, so the little princess felt a glimmer of hope that there might be a happy ending ahead.

But the sewing lady had never made a quilt in her whole life, and didn't know what was what or which way was up, and kept going on and on about log cabin blocks. The little princess had to stamp her tiny foot - making the whole mattress mountain wobble - to say 'NO NO NO. I am a princess and I do not do log cabins at all, I do castles and dragons and legumes. And can you not see, foolish sewing lady who has never made a quilt, that my mattresses are horizontal and so your stripes should clearly be horizontal too'.

The befuddled lady was way out of her depth and knew it was time to look for help. So she turned to her fairy godmother online sewing friends, who said 'this is the pattern you need, and this tutorial will solve your binding angst, and this one will help with the hand stitching - which you can do on the sofa, so be happy - and always cut your backing and wadding bigger than your front piece and always use a walking foot if you have one'.

And the little princess had her cosy quilt in a twinkling.

She didn't even mind being wrapped up in a parcel, because it reminded her a bit of her nice brown envelope, and because she knew that her happy-ever-after ending would come one day very soon.

 Happy Christmas!