Christmas with the Three Bears

            

       

The "black forest" tree decorated with bears, antique illustrations, and miniature chairs.

   Christmas is only a few weeks away!

 

My "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" guest room last Christmas.

 It's my favorite holiday, but I still feel a sense of panic when I realize just how little time there is to get presents bought and shipped. I've started to think about Christmas decorating. This time last year, I had finished all my decorating, but I had to have the house ready for a Christmas tour. This year, I'm just now beginning to think about it!

The other end of the Goldilocks room. Not a great photo, but maybe you can see the three stuffed bears with the bowl of porridge on the antique trunk. The book in front of the quilt is open to the story of The Three Bears.

  I  used a quilt for inspiration in this room.  The tree is decorated with Scherensnitte bears, copies of illustrations of the story from antique books (mounted on cardboard), and miniature doll chairs. 

I had a small, narrow tree to represent the Black Forest. (In actuality, I brought home a tree that turned out to be BLACK ! I thought Black pine was similar to white pine or yellow pine, just another type of pine tree. It wasn't. I decided that it would be okay and it was. With all the little white twinkly lights, you could barely tell that it was not just a dark green.

One of the Scherensnitte bears, cut from plain white paper and coffee stained.

          This year, I plan to add Goldilocks if I do this room again.  

I've been working hard at getting a pattern made for this doll. I have little deformed doll bodies, arms, legs, and heads all over the room from my trials and errors. I have to make it easy enough for an inexperienced doll maker, yet detailed enough to be recognizable as the Goldilocks in my quilt pattern.  

All this to remind you that you can decorate around your quilts. You can use a quilt as a tree skirt. Why not take that another step and decorate the tree in ornaments that are in colors from the quilt? 

You could "decoupage" ornaments in fabric scraps.

You could make little stuffed pieced stars.

You could make yo-yo chains from scraps.

You could decorate the tree in your quilting room with spools of colorful thread or pin cushions.

 If you have some ideas for incorporating quilts and fabric into your Christmas decorating, post them in your comments. We'd like to know! In the meantime, Happy Decorating!