A Quilty Christmas in July Party!

 This is my Snow Village quilt pattern.  It's very simple.  All the houses are the same.  And that is not like me.  I usually like scrappy quilts! The whole pattern had been screaming at me for a while to make it scrappy and add some embellishments.

So one day last January I finally tested my idea.  I embroidered some little wreaths on pieces of wool and top-stitched them to the front of a house for "windows".  I added in some little pom poms under the roof and planned on adding a button for a "door knob" on the front door. 

I thought, how fun would it be to make a bunch of house blocks with my local quilt group!?!  In fact, we could make a whole "Christmas in July" party out of it!  I checked with our guild president and she thought it was a fun idea too, so we made plans for our first annual Sassy Stitcher's Christmas in July party!

A few months later we met at our usual sew day spot and the fun began.  Everyone brought their favorite Christmas treat and an embellishment to share.

We even shared Christmas fabric!

We started off the day with a demo by yours truly.  I showed everyone how to add chimneys to the roof units.  See the bottom of THIS post for a tutorial on how to do that.

It was fun to see everyone's embellishing ideas, color palettes, and creativity!

And it wouldn't be a Christmas party without some Minute-To-Win-It games, right?

We had a "snowball toss" with big marshmallows and red Solo cups (played in teams).  Whoever had the most marshmallows in their cup by the end of the minute, won.

We built snowmen (the first team to finish wrapping someone with a roll of toilet paper, won). I'm pretty sure we had a hat and scarf they had to finish their "snowman" off with but don't have any pictures of that.  As you can see things got pretty wild; this was the funniest game of the 3 we played.

The last game was Name That Tune and we had prizes for all the winners of all the games, of course.

Even lunch was festive!

It was such a fun day that we decided we want to have a Christmas in July party every year!  We think it will be a fun tradition but we'll mix up the project and activities each year.  My friend and I are over the "traditions" committee so we're already scheming for that!  If you have any suggestions please leave them in the comment section below.  I'd love to hear them!

This post is so long already so I am going to share my finished scrappy Snow Village quilt in a separate post.  If you want to see it, click HERE.  And if you want to grab the Snow Village paper pattern, click HERE.  Or click HERE for the PDF pattern.

I hope this encourages you to have your own Christmas in July party with your quilty friends.  It was so fun and quilters love any excuse to sew, munch and mingle, am I right?   

Thanks for stopping by and happy quilting!