Snowflake Flowers

My friend Pat just went through a few months worth of this blog and asked me "How do you make those snowflakes?"

For me, they are easy, so I thought that I'd demonstrate. Since, spring is coming, I thought I'd use brightly colored origami paper and try to make the snowflakes look more like flowers.

First, you start with a square of paper and fold it in half and then in half again. Pay attention to where the center of the paper is and then fold diagonally going through the center corner.

At this point I pick up the paper being sure to hold it at the center. If you start at the wrong corner you won't end up with a snowflake - just pieces of paper.

The two sides radiating from this corner will become the spines of the snowflake. You need to cut a random pattern into the third side (a very fancy V) making sure you don't cut the two sides coming from the center.

Now, you may cut off a piece of the center and pieces along the two sides. These will become the holes in the snowflake. If you are not careful you could lop off a section of the snowflake and ruin it.

Then you start to unfold to see what you've got ...

Then Pat said "those would look good a non ravelling fabric (felt?) and appliqued on something".

That got me thinking. This is Hawaiian Quilting. I was in Hawaii more than a few years ago and bought a kit to make an appliqued pillow. Once I got home and the excitement wore off I wondered why I had done that. I had made a quilt with some hand applique (and tried almost every method out there, except needleturn) and didn't really enjoy the process. Now I had a project with not just applique, but needleturn applique. I have seen it demonstated plenty of times courtesty of "Simply Quilts" and quilt shows. Since I didn't want the kit to sit there in a drawer forever and couldn't see any other alternatives I jumped in and started to needleturn. It really wasn't that bad and I finished it.

That is, I finished the applique. The pattern is called Breadfruit. I haven't quilted it turned it into a pillow yet. You can see how the design was created the same way that the snowflakes were. I imagine it would be a challenge to cut out of fabric, but I didn't have to do that. It came pre-cut.

I think I'll stick with paper snowflakes for now. But, I really do need to finish the pillow sometime...

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