A Quilted Christmas Tree Story

In December of 2020, someone in one of my online quilting groups shared a photo they had seen on Pinterest—a quilt shaped into a cone and used as a Christmas tree draped with fairy lights. I wondered if it would be possible to make a conical quilted Christmas tree, including integrated lights as part of the design. Incandescent lights would not be safe, so I researched and found that LED lights don’t get hot enough to be as dangerous—though I would still have to be careful with display and storage.

Starting the Quilted Christmas Tree Process

To design it, I used my skills as a high school geometry and trigonometry teacher, cutting designs in miniature from paper to see if the idea would work. A cone flattens out to a perfect sector (pie piece or wedge) of a circle, so I started there. I chose a 60° wedge for several reasons.

To start, it’s mathematically simple to work with, and my quilting rulers already have markings for 60°, so it would be easy to cut the pieces I needed. I also found that a wedge that size would give me a good ratio of height to diameter so that the tree would be tall enough without being too wide—or too narrow—at the base.

I played with several design concepts: diamond-shaped log cabin blocks, flying geese, hexagons, equilateral triangles, as well as a few others. I did a lot of number crunching to figure out what size flat circle would yield the 8′ tall tree I wanted. Since I already had a ruler for cutting equilateral triangles, I decided to go for that approach.

So Many Choices!

It didn’t make sense to have all the green background triangles match in color, because then why cut them at all? I ordered about 12 one-yard cuts of medium to dark solid green fabrics and while I waited for those, I thought about what to do about the ornaments.

Did I want them pieced into blocks or appliquéd to the blocks? How many did I need? Solids or prints? A particular color theme or mixed? Scrappy or the same fabrics all over? What size and shape should the ornament be? All the same or a mixture?

For blocks that ended up at the edges or at the top and bottom and would be trimmed to the arc of the circle at the end, did I want to leave those triangles bare so that no partial ornaments were included?

The Final Decision

I decided on a scrappy mix of circular ornaments, hand-appliquéd to each triangle so that there would be no added thickness from a fusible web to get in the way…which would mean around 700 circles.

The problem with this idea? I don’t enjoy hand-appliqué; I seem to have a ‘need for speed’, and appliqué can be too slow. The preparation step usually is enough to halt progress on anything involving appliqué for me, but I was determined.

I looked around online and asked friends who love appliqué for their recommendations for any tools that would speed up that process. I ordered two sets of Applipops so that I would have metal templates for circles in various sizes.

Before I got too committed, I needed to see if the idea would work. So, I cut triangles from a few of the green fabrics and made a small mockup. This let me test the shape and ratio—since a fullsize tree would have the same ratio as the test tree. It also gave me an opportunity to see if I liked using the Applipops.

Let’s Make This Quilted Christmas Tree

Initially, I had only planned on using 1 ½″ circles in various red and yellow prints but found that to be far less interesting (both to do and to look at) than a mixture of prints in various sizes and colors. The only colors I decided not to use were black, white, and dark green.

I appliquéd circles onto nine triangles and assembled those appliquéd equilateral triangles into one larger one. Then I trimmed the flat triangle so that it was a perfect wedge of a circle and sewed the side seam to make a cone. IT WORKED.

I was giddy, but then I looked at that pile of green fabrics waiting to be cut and the box of 2½″ squares to be prepped for appliqué and realized that the next few months were going to be…slow. I’m not a very patient person, but I HAD to try.

As I often say to my husband, “This will either be REALLY COOL, or it will be a spectacular waste of fabric.” I was pretty sure this would be amazing if I could finish it. What else would I do with ALL THAT GREEN FABRIC?!

A Lengthy Project

I got a lot faster at the prep and appliqué of the circles. I started working on it in earnest the week after Christmas in 2020 and finished with the appliqué on May 1, working almost every evening after school. Longarm quilting took about two days, the edge finishes took about a week, the buttonholes took about a week and a half, and the setup took an entire weekend.

On average, it took an hour to prep 15 circles using a paintbrush, starch, Applipops, and a very hot iron, then another two hours to appliqué them to the triangles. So, one night I’d prep circles in front of the TV and the next night I’d sew them all down.

Because equilateral triangles and circles have geometric properties that can identify the centers without measuring, I didn’t have to pre-mark where the circles would go ahead of time—I’d locate the center of the circle and the centroid of the triangle by folding, pin the circle in place, and appliqué it down.

I stored the completed triangles in baggies of 50, making sure to distribute background colors and ornament colors and sizes throughout. When I had enough (over 700), I began to assemble the full flat triangle. The side edges were roughly 95″-long, and the base of the triangle was around 111″-wide to compensate for the curve I would cut when the quilting was finished.

Bringing It All Together

I pushed the problem of how to handle the lights out of my mind, for the time being, knowing that I could always drape with fairy lights. I knew that looked great from the photo that started me down this rabbit hole, so I just chose not to think about it yet. I also put off thinking about how to support it from underneath, though a few ideas were percolating there as well.

After quilting it on my Innova longarm, I had to trim it into the shape of a flattened cone. I cut a wedge from a circle with a 12″ radius out of freezer paper and aligned the side edges of the wedge to the side edges of the quilted tree, pinning to hold it in place.

I used the tip of that wedge as the starting point and marked a continuous arc 111″ from that tip across the bottom. I also marked the edge of the freezer paper circle at the top edge of the flat tree and cut smooth curves through both chalk markings.

Once the tree was quilted and trimmed, I had to resolve how to finish the edges and close it into a cone. With the excess triangle pieces of backing fabric, I made bias binding and finished the top and bottom curves, trimming the ends of the bindings even with the side edges. Then I attached a 93″-long separating sleeping bag zipper to the two sides, and hand-sewed facings down snugly on the inside to enclose all the raw edges.

Now That’s a Bright Idea

Then…the lights. With pieces of the quilted section that had been trimmed off, I tested several sizes of buttonholes with my Janome until I found a size that would be easy to program and repeat, easy to cut, and would be secure enough to hold the lights in place without being so tight as to cause a fire hazard.

I cut the buttonholes through the scraps without issue, but then I had to take the plunge and cut one in the real tree—which was now finished and ready to display except for the buttonholes. Then I chose an inconspicuous spot on the very back of the very top of the tree and placed the first buttonhole, hovering over it with the seam ripper, trying to get the nerve to cut.

Once I did the first one, it was easy to do the rest. I did a test with some lights I had and knew that my idea WAS going to work. That triumph pushed me to see the project through in time for Christmas.

It did take about a week of working every night to get over 750 buttonholes sewn and cut. I alternated placing two and three buttonholes around every place in the quilt where the points of six triangles came together. Even using the same medium green thread on all those different backgrounds, the buttonholes didn’t really show up.

The Weight of Success

The next problem was what to do about the setup and support underneath. We have plenty of strings of LEDs, but they only have 50-100 lights on them before it’s necessary to plug in another string.

That many junctions would make the tree lumpy in places as well as be a fire hazard, so I started looking around at local stores and finally online. I found a string of 750 color-changing LED Christmas lights on Amazon. It was a SIGN! I ordered them with enthusiasm—and they were perfect!

My husband and I figured out how to create a (very crude) support system of 2×4s and plywood wrapped in chicken wire to go underneath the quilt to help it stand on its own.

The chicken wire would be multi-purpose: it would keep the lights from making the tree sag, help hold the lights in place, and if the cats went under the tree, it would protect the lights from being pulled out by curious felines. We spent an afternoon in December building the structure, and it took me two days to load the tree onto it.

The Final Touches to the Quilted Christmas Tree

One last-minute problem I ran into that I was not expecting—the LEDs I purchased, while perfect in quantity and look, were cylindrical and did not have a wider base like the ones I had used to determine the size of the buttonholes.

Because of this, they kept sliding out of the buttonholes as I tried to zip up the tree, and any adjustments to a light after the tree was closed would cause other lights to disappear into the inside of the tree. I WAS SO CLOSE, and this was a devastating problem to have right at the end.

Thankfully, I’m stubborn and have a completely ridiculous stash of safety pins from the days before I had a longarm machine. I took the tree off its structure and pinned every single buttonhole closed from the back to secure each LED in place so they wouldn’t come out. All 750 of them. By hand. But it worked, and every light stayed in place when the tree was zipped up.

When we stood back and looked at it, my husband and I agreed that the project had been even more of a success than I had hoped. I posted photos and videos of it on my Instagram account (@messygoat), and the internet seemed to agree with that assessment.

Oh Quilted Christmas Tree, How Lovely Are Thy Patches?

My family may not share my enthusiasm for this idea and we will probably still have other trees at Christmas. The best part about this one: it folds up flat like a quilt when the lights are removed, so the entire thing, including the lights and all but the bottom circle of the support system, can fit in an under-bed bin with room left over.

Safety note: When the tree is lit, there is always someone at home. We also have the lights on a timer so we don’t forget to turn them off at night. There was a smoke detector almost directly above the tree in 2021 as well. I would not use incandescent lights in a tree like this—they get too hot to be safe.

The Quilted Christmas Tree Evolution

For Christmas in 2022, I hope to have a lit 3D tree topper for the Quiltmas Tree, and I want to try to create a quilted Moravian star out of various white fabrics over a wire armature. Follow my Instagram (@messygoat) to see if I manage to pull it off! I have built a pattern and plan to have an informal “Quiltmas Tree in July” sew-along in the summer to get people started on their own tree(s). I’ve redesigned the tree for the pattern to make it less challenging for those who aren’t quite as adventurous (or who don’t like the number crunching).

The pattern is in a modular format so that you can make a smaller tree to try it out—without having to buy the entire pattern for the 8-foot monstrosity I made. I’m in the final stages of putting the pattern together at the time of this writing, but my Instagram profile will have links so that you can find information there on where to get the pattern.