Shimmering Snowflake

I have a very dear friend. In addition to being my friend, she is also my “call NH Fish and Game if I don’t check in after a hike” person. While she is incredible, she has one major flaw: she loves snow. I don’t get it, but I love her anyway.

I decided to make her a quilt, and of course, snow had to be involved. I found “Shimmering Snowflake”, a Robert Kaufman pattern. Unfortunately for me, it involves mostly half-square triangles. I’m not a fan of triangles in quilts I make. They’re fiddly and potentially difficult.

Quick fabric digression: Fabric has a warp and weft. That means the fibers go up and down, and left and right. Cutting squares and rectangles “on the grain” means aligning with the warp and weft. It keeps the fabric stable. When you cut diagonally (as you would for a triangle), you no longer have the stability of the warp and weft working for you. The fabric becomes stretchy. When sewing pieces together, stretchy is bad. The fabric can distort, and when sewn together, may no longer lay flat. Not good for a quilt.

Quick triangle digression: Triangles have points. When quilting, you have to be much more careful with triangles to be sure you don’t cut off the points when sewing pieces together. If you shave a tiny bit off of a square or rectangle, it isn’t so noticeable. If you cut off the tip of a triangle, it’s very obvious. Fiddly.

This pattern has 132 “half square triangles”, which is really 264 triangles that are paired up into squares. Now, the good news, is that half square triangles mitigate some of the stretch, since you sew squares together, and cut them apart into half square triangles. Meaning, the potentially stretchy diagonal isn’t ever unsewn. You sew, then cut. Providing some stability.

However, in order to preserve those lovely points, you have to be sure your squares are perfect. The diagonal has to go corner to corner. So there is a lot of trimming involved. Again, fiddly.

You can buy specialty rulers, but I’m trying to not spend money I don’t need to spend, so I used some painters tape to convert one of my rulers into a half-square triangle ruler.

Line up the diagonal of the square with the diagonal tape, make sure the bottom part fills the blue tape, cut off the excess. Flip it around and cut off the other half’s excess. That’s just a portion of my “trim pile” after trimming them all.

Next up, organization. Lots of half square triangles, that frankly, look similar. I wasn’t using the same fabrics from the pattern, so I had to make sure I didn’t put something in the wrong spot.

Finally ready to put it all together! It actually wasn’t too bad, or at least easier than I feared it would be. Next up was quilting. As this was a gift, I wanted my best quilting. For me, that means straight line quilting. Normally I would have just done straight across, or up/down. Maybe even diamonds. But the pattern is a giant snowflake, so I wanted to emphasize that. So I made my life harder, by coming down the center, then turning and going up at a diagonal. Also due to the size of the blocks and other considerations, I decided spacing should be every 1/2″. It took a very long time and was very tedious since I couldn’t just mindlessly zip across the quilt for each line.

Frighteningly, one of the very first quilt lines I sewed, I got some sort of stain or marking on the top. Possibly sewing machine oil? I should never (and probably will never) make a white quilt again. It was very demotivating to keep seeing that spot every time I came near the center of the quilt. Plus it was on a BLUE fabric, so I couldn’t even spot bleach it out. Anyway, I persevered and thankfully, it came out when I washed the quilt.

I used leftover colored fabrics from the quilt for a scrappy binding. I had a swirly white fabric for the backing.

All in all, I LOVE how it turned out, and wistfully put it in the box to send to my friend.