My Frozen Quilt Kit arrived from Fons & Porter and it's really nice! It came with the Elsa & Anna panel, border fabrics, sparkly fabric for the snow flakes, and assorted fat quarters for backgrounds for the flakes. I was happy to have the kit so that I could duplicate those fat quarters and make a second quilt for DD#2.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the Moda Marbles line locally or even something similar so I ended up just getting two patterned fabrics that could work and some solid royal blue for the border. The first thing I am doing is making the snowflakes. The glitter fabric is pretty but I'm not so sure the sparkle will last through many washings since I am already covered in silver glitter just from working with it!
The pattern instructions use an AccuQuilt Go! die for the snowflakes but at US$99 there is no way I would buy it even if I did have the machine or if it would work in my Big Shot. Instead, I traced the shape of each of the three snowflakes onto fusible web using my wonderful new light box for a total of 22 (7, 7, and 8), fused it, and am now in the process of hand cutting out the snowflakes. Now I wish I spent the $99 on the die! It is very delicate, tedious, slow, and crampy work! I am not enjoying this part of the process! However, the glittery snowflakes are beautiful and I think they will look terrific! I am not looking forward to appliqueing them onto the background squares since they have so many nooks and crannies so I think I will just do a straight stitch on them (versus a blanket stitch or zigzag) and save my sanity.
Originally, I thought I would simply replicate the quilt for the second one but now I can't find the glitter fabric and don't have enough scraps to make another 22 snowflakes. They are also such a pain to make and sew that I can't really see myself doing any more after these. I considered making some smaller snowflakes (by shrinking the printout pattern) and using the smaller leftovers of glitter fabric but that would make the job even harder. To be fair, my solution is to make all the blocks and then share them between the two quilts, alternating with plain blocks. I don't think either girl would mind and since they haven't seen the original quilt/pattern, they shouldn't ever know the difference. Hopefully the quilts don't look too weird with the extra fabric I bought as a substitute. I will set them out when I'm finished appliqueing to make sure and then decide what to do. I may even have something appropriate in my stash, I just didn't look yet.
All this has been accomplished on a short break from the DWR quilt. I didn't move my tables or set up properly for the Frozen quilts yet, I'm just getting the ball rolling and working on cutting the snowflakes while I watch television. They shouldn't really take long to piece since it's just the panel with borders - the snowflakes are the hardest part. Quilting should be fairly quick too since it's some outline quilting in the panel and some straight line quilting in the borders. Easy peasy after the free-motion I've been doing!
Comments