Winter Magic

 

I don't know how long I've had the Winter Magic pattern. During my short stint as a director of care, I wanted to make it bigger and hang it on the wall in my office at work during the winter season. That was nearly 7 years ago and I never did get around to making it before I lost the job. So, I likely have had the pattern for at least 10 years, long enough that the pattern is no longer available from Patchworks Studio. And most, if not all, of the fabrics for it for almost as long.
I love bling and bling-y fabrics. So, I started collecting bling-y blue fabric to use in this project. All but the darkest blue have sparkles/shimmer. The white is a Michael Miller Fairy Frost with sparkles. I actually planned on saving that one for a different project, although I don't think I had a specific project in mind. 😁 But I decided it would look great in this snowflake themed wall hanging. After all, what is more sparkly than a new fallen snow on a sunny day?
But I am very thankful that I didn't decide to make it bigger. It was incredibly labour-intensive. I estimated that it probably took me 11-12 hours just to stitch down all the snowflakes. And that's not including all of the tracing, applying fusible web, and cutting. However, in spite of the fact that there are 40 snowflakes on this wall hanging, I actually only had to cut out 20. That's because this is a "Give and Take" appliqué project. I used this technique once before, in Celtic Ballad. 
Basically, it works like this: trace the design onto a piece of fusible web cut to the dimensions indicated in the pattern. Fuse it to the back of a piece of fabric the same size. Carefully cut out the design. I say carefully because you will be using both the original piece of fabric and the piece you cut from it, so no just snipping happily and carelessly into the fabric. Fuse the original to a piece of coordinating fabric of the same size, and the cut out piece to another piece of fabric as indicated in the pattern. So, all of the larger pieces of fabric (7" x 12" unfinished size) with the white snowflakes are actually the original fabrics to which the design was fused and from which the snowflakes were cut. These large pieces were then fused to 7" x 12" pieces of the white fabric, so that the white shows through. And then the blue snowflakes were fused elsewhere. There is a LOT of Heat'N'Bond in this quilt top, including in the seams! Ten 7" x 12" pieces! So it's very stiff. 
Then all of those snowflakes had to be stitched down, which was quite tedious. It's not like stitching down a nice circle or square. No, snowflakes have all kinds of points and corners and angles, requiring moving the fabric this way and that while stitching. It was bad enough with the snowflakes on the main body of the wall hanging. They could at least be stitched down on the individual pieces of fabric. But when it came to the ones that are in the border, I had to wait until the quilt top was finished before I could fuse and appliqué them. That meant moving around the whole quilt top while stitching! So those snowflakes took even longer. 

Finally that was finished and then came the quilting. I had determined to use a silver metallic for the quilting and the Deb's Snowflakes Meander pantograph. It's quite pretty, but it's 15.5" wide - really stretching the limits of the throat space on my Amara! I've used it once before, in the Christmas Medallion quilt, which is 60" square, but I wouldn't really want to go any bigger than that. So, I knew it was doable. I just had to have my starting point up tight to the back of the throat space. 
But the width of the pantograph wasn't the biggest issue. It was the metallic thread. I had used it once or twice before, but that was several years ago. And, other than knowing that the tension needed to be looser, I couldn't remember what else I needed to adjust. So I watched a Handi Quilter video and made adjustments as I saw fit. But the thread kept breaking. I suspect that the abundance of fusible web in the quilt top may have been a big factor. I was also using some anonymous prefilled bobbin, and after adjusting multiple other things, I finally decided to change the bobbin thread and switched to Glide 60. It stitched much better after that, but broke once more before finishing the row. Then I asked for advice in the Handi Quilter community group on Facebook and I got some hints, some worthwhile and some not so much. But I put a line of Sewer's Aid up the side of the cone of thread and didn't have another thread break after that. I'm not sure if it was the Sewer's Aid or the fact that my machine was liking the Glide 60 much better. But I finished the quilting last evening. Being a wide pantograph, it only took 3 rows (2 full rows and a part row) of quilting. It is a pretty labour-intensive pantograph, with all of the points, angles and straight lines, but I needed to go slowly anyways because of using metallic thread. 

It wasn't until I was working with the quilt this morning to put the binding and label on that I realized that there were a lot of loopy messes on the back. So, obviously my top thread was a little too loose. But I'm just not going to worry about it. It is a wall hanging after all, and the loopy messes will be facing the wall. The top stitching looks fine. And the wall hanging is mine, so I don't have to worry about gifting inferior work. And I guess I better not plan on entering it into any fairs! It will be my January wall hanging in my monthly rotation of wall hangings. But I have it up in my living room now so that I can enjoy it for awhile after putting all of that work into it, and not have to wait until next January. 
Now, I have to decide on a table treatment for January. I have some ideas, but that can wait until next time. 

Family

 

I very rarely make the same quilt more than once. To me, that would be boring. I like new challenges and different techniques. and I always sort of scratch my head when someone says that they've made X number of this particular quilt pattern. But this quilt has a very special purpose. And so I made 5 of them. 
My siblings and I have lost both our parents, Mom in 1998 and Dad in 2000. In 2009, we lost our only brother. And in October 2023, we lost our second oldest sister, Judy. She was the one who stepped into the matriarchal role once our mother passed away, and I can honestly say that she was everyone's favourite sister. It's been very hard. And most of us live quite far apart. My youngest sister is in Nova Scotia, two sisters in Ontario, one in Michigan and me in Alberta. In spite of the distances, we are still close. And we miss each other. So, when I saw this fabric during a sale in my LQS,

I figured it needed to be in a very special quilt. Mulling it over, I decided to make each of us remaining sisters a quilt, a snuggle-sized quilt with a minky backing, something we can cuddle up in when we're missing each other. 
I wanted to use everyone's favourite colour to represent them in the quilts. But first I had to find out what those favourite colours were. A few of us were easy: Dad's favourite had always been red, Judy's had always been green and mine has always been purple. When we were younger, my youngest sister Cindy's favourite had been blue, and my next older sister Janet's favourite had been pink. But some people change over time, and when I had asked for favourites for a different project, Cindy had said jewel tones and fire engine red, and for Janet, it was coral and aqua, while Therese (oldest) and Nancy (middle) had said something similar like red, blue and yellow. Or something like that. But I had had to have them narrow it down to one specific colour each. Cindy surprised me by picking dark purple. Janet went with aqua. Therese said sunshine yellow (had to be a very specific yellow) and Nancy said muted grey. Opinions varied on what colour should represent our mother. Pink, purple, fuchsia were suggested, and I settled on something that appeared to be a combination of those. 

But no one in the family could recall my brother, Bill, having a favourite colour. 

These are the colours I had come up with. I gave Cindy the option of which purple she wanted to represent her in the quilt: the medium dark second from the right or the ultra dark on the far right. She chose the medium dark. 
Nancy contacted our sister-in-law and I contacted my brother's son and daughter to see if any of them recalled Bill having a favourite colour. No one was aware of any. Since he was a big Toronto Maple Leafs fan, I suggested Maple Leaf blue and my sisters agreed. But I couldn't find exactly what I wanted in my LQS: nothing that was exactly the right colour and preferably in a tonal fabric. I didn't want really distinct patterns. Then I recalled the blue maple leaf print I had used in On Guard for Thee and I ended up having just enough for all of the blocks required. 
But before I got to that point, I had to actually decide how I was going to use all of these different fabrics. Initially, I considered using them all in the same block, or maybe just all in different places in the quilt top. Finally, I chose to use the Sister's Choice quilt block, a good choice, I think, since we're all sisters. 

For the background fabric in the blocks, I chose this fabric which features two hands being held in the shape of a heart. 

And I made a Sister's Choice quilt block out of each colour,

and since I had chosen a layout requiring 12 blocks, I used all 9 colours in the remaining three blocks. 

Once I had settled on a layout, I had to decide what fabric to use to fill in the squares between the blocks. I went back to the quilt shop to buy more of the word fabric, but there was a sale going on and they had already sold out. In hindsight, I think it's all for the best. I would have had lots of "fun" cutting all of those squares on the diagonal to keep the words going left to right. As it is, I thank God that I was able to get the words in the setting triangles all going in the right direction. However, that still left me with the quandary of what fabric to use for those alternate squares. I took home a metre each of two different fabrics that I felt pulled in most of the colours in the blocks to see if either of them would work. 

I didn't want anything to compete with the blocks, 

and wasn't really sure about either of these. So, I went back to the quilt shop and purchased a rose print that was from the same line as the word fabric. 

But it was very boring, and my family is anything but boring. So, I texted my youngest sister with the pictures of the other two fabrics. She chose the maple leaf fabric, and I agreed. The watercolour (or whatever you want to call the other print) is awesome, but it draws too much attention away from the quilt blocks, which are supposed to be the focus of the quilt. Besides, we're Canadian, so the maple leaf fabric is appropriate. 
While the quilt tops are identical, I chose to personalize each quilt, by using the fabric that represented the recipient in the quilt top as the binding fabric as well. Then I used that same colour for the minky backing, and the quilting thread. 

I did forewarn my sisters that I probably wouldn't get these quilts done quickly. I did, however, complete one relatively quickly just to see the overall effect. That one went to my youngest sister in time for her milestone birthday in March. That's hers at the top of the post. 

We nearly lost my oldest sister this summer to undiagnosed heart disease. She ended up having open heart surgery and is doing well now, thank the Lord. So her quilt was the next to go out in August, together with a Through My Window wallhanging as a get well gift. 

My middle sister also had a milestone birthday this year, in November. So I finished her quilt in time to send it with her birthday gift, my second Through My Window wallhanging. 

In late October, I finished the last one for my sisters, this one for the next oldest sister, that is closest to me in age, and got it shipped off. All that was left was mine.

But Christmas quilts, baking and cooking intervened and I didn't get mine finished until now - March of 2025. 

I chose the Hearts in Bloom pantograph for the quilting on each quilt.

Because Cindy and I both chose purple to represent us in the quilts, I used a minky dot for the backing on mine, so that there would be a difference in the backing.
And I don't ever want to make 5 of the same quilt again. By the time I got to mine, I felt like doing something goofy with the blocks, something to switch it up. But I restrained myself, because I did want us all to have the same quilt. It's just not likely to ever happen again. It's taken me about a year to get all 5 made.