Frozen – The Itinerant Chemist

And they’re finished! 😀 I used a simple envelope+buttons arrangement for the backs, luckily my favourite haberdashery stall in a local market had just the right buttons in just the right colours:

And here are some close-up shots:

You can read more about the fronts here and here.

I must say a big thank you to the people who offered suggestions on how to finish off the quilting on Elsa, it really was a help! Lifting the “ground” level brought everything together much better. And after doodling around a bit and trying a few of the suggestions (and screaming in frustration at my white rayon, which decided to HATE almost all my assorted needles for some reason – the “right” one turned out to be a microtex 80/12), I ended up with this:

It’s not at all what I thought I’d end up with, but I think it works. 🙂 I got a great tip from Carole Gold about using tracing paper to test and stitch FMQ designs, and although I wasn’t able to use it this time because it turns out we have nothing like that in the house (not-quite-moving house really sucks), it’s a great idea that I’m definitely going to try on other projects once I’ve grabbed myself a roll of baking paper to use. 🙂

Linking up with Let’s Bee Social, Free-Motion Mavericks, Can I get a Whoop Whoop? and TGIFF. 🙂

Here’s the third cushion cover that I’m making as a Christmas present (the first two are here). It’s for a little girl, so I chose to do Elsa from Frozen as an applique – her mum tells me she’s a fan. I found some wonderful metallic-finish fabrics at a recent craft show and dug out a slightly shimmery white from my stash and I was ready to rock some Frozen goodness.

And what would Elsa be without some magic-y icy swirls? I doodled a few up in Inkscape and appliqued them with a wonderfully frost-coloured fabric:

And no matter how hard I tried, the shiny bits (well, all the bits are shiny) refused to photograph well. 🙁 I used a different colour of the swirl fabric for the outer border, which brings the top up to the same size as its fellows (20.5″ square). The Elsa applique was secured with machine satin stitch in a variegated teal thread and the swirls were done with an icy-looking metallic thread. And I will not be rushing to do satin stitch around iddly-tiddly little fingers again in a hurry!

As with the Minecraft cushions, my first action was to quilt in the ditch all the way around the border to secure all the layers together and make a nice boundary. My plan after that became somewhat nebulous, but I decided to start with the obvious things, so I quilted (with the same teal thread) around Elsa and then broke out the metallic thread to do the same around the icy swirls.

As I did so, I started to add in random flourishes and twiddles and joined some of the applique swirls together in whatever manner seemed appropriate at the time. My confidence grew as I quilted each swirl and I worked from bottom to top, so the upper swirls are a bit more elaborate as a result! I’m probably going to go back and add a few more twirls in on the lower bits. At this point, though, I’m a little stumped. I cannot decide whether to leave the ice-swirl quilting as it is or add further quilting in the background to make it look more snowy. I like the magic-y bits and I don’t really want them to be lost, but the rest of the top looks a bit “bare”. To delay any firm decision in that direction, I dug out some pale blue rayon thread and started quilting the “ground” instead. I made it a bit more wavy than I’d initially intended, but I think it’s just about ok. I’ll do more lines of quilting below those two, probably spacing them further apart as I get closer to the bottom of the panel. Yay progress! 🙂

Linking up with Let’s Bee Social and Free-Motion Mavericks (when it goes live). 🙂