let it snow!

Friday night I chose sleep over finishing my challenge on time. Last night I chose the challenge over sleep.

My quilt was inspired by the digital photography of Kenneth Libbrecht, whose work appears on the 2006 U.S. holiday postage stamps. I used elements of real snowflakes combined with elements from my imagination to sketch a snowflake of my own that could be real, and most importantly, could be realistically made into a quilt.

I chose two batiks, one for the front and one for the back so I could see what it would look like in different fabrics. As a bonus, that made it reversible! The batiks are fused to Timtex interfacing for the batting, and I used gold metallic thread for the edging and quilting.

First I applied yarn around the outer edges and used a machine overlock stitch on top, which turned out rather decoratively like that loopy-edged kind of ribbon. Then I echo-quilted the snowflake before cutting out the center windows with an X-acto blade. Next I zig-zagged around the windows, and finally added the hot-fix gold brads on the front. All in all, a very quick project!

I used fishing line to hang the quilt. The front is photographed in front of a black piece of fabric and the back in front of a purple-painted wall. Currently it's hanging from my kitchen light fixture as part of my Christmas décor. I like the way it gently turns round and round with the air currents. (I would have taken a picture, but it wouldn't have the same effect unless I figured out the video capabilities on my digital camera so you could see it rotating.) I am quite pleased with the way it turned out. Maybe I'll make one snowflake each winter and eventually have quite a collection.