Friday, December 4, 2009

Flashback Friday -- Snowflake Quilt

Here's the quilt that started my love for handwork:

I made this one, wow, six or seven years ago. (Has it really been that long??) This was an absolute "wing it" project from start to finish. I started by printing out a few photos of magnified snowflakes I'd found online. From there I made them into patterns for the snowflakes, making up many of my own as well, which I fused onto random pieces of blue fabric I had.

After that I reluctantly decided that if I ever wanted to be able to wash the finished project, the snowflakes needed to be stitched around the edges to prevent them from coming off. I purchased some sparkly silver thread and commenced doing all those itty-bitty blanket stitches. I loved the sparkly edges, and actually really enjoyed the process! It's nice to have your hands busy doing something when you are "doing nothing" -- like watching movies or commuting!

I couldn't decide then how to best approach making a quilt from my blocks. I certainly didn't want them to be lined up in straight rows. Finally I decided I would need to attach them all to a background piece, rather than try and piece them in funny angles with all that bias cutting. I found a sparkly snowflake background fabric I liked, laid them all on top the way I liked (as though they were falling snow!), and safety-pinned them in place. I turned each edge under and stitched them down.

I used another metallic thread for the quilting. I started by quilting around each square. Then I free-motion quilted around the snowflakes -- about 1/4" from the edges. That wasn't enough quilting, so I then quilted little asterisk-y snowflakes here and there to fill in the empty spaces.

I just love the quilted snowflake outlines on the back -- which is, of course, also sparkly!

I really enjoy creating make-it-up-as-you-go quilts. It is often quite surprising where the journey will take you!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow that is a great quilt!!! Good job

Rose said...

That is gorgeous, I love it.

Summer Rae said...

Adorable! I love snowflakes.

Crystal Hendrix said...

That is a very cool quilt! I love it! So much patience it must of taken!!

Ms Muffin said...

WOW! I was never a big fan of quilts. I mean, I always admired all the work that goes into it ... but most quilts were not ones that I would put into my home. (There are exceptions though.) But this! WOW! This is SO gorgeous! I might actually have to get into quilting some day to make something like this! Really really love it!

Leslie said...

I just found your blog via someone else's, and I just thought you'd like to know that I have a photo of THIS QUILT saved in my "Snowflake" file on my computer. (Yes, I do have a file just for images of snowflakes.) I found it through Google images a while back while trying to decide how I wanted to do some snowflake-related Christmas craft project. It is one of my very favorite images in the file. It's so funny how the world is so small and how things always go around in a circle. Good work!

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