Do You Want to Quilt a Frozen? ... or two

You may have heard about this movie Disney recently released... Frozen.  Honestly unless you have been living under a rock, or holed up in your house, you have happened across the Frozen Phenomenon.  My children are too old to be really interested in it, but even my son has taken to singing Olaf's words of snow in summer, again and again and again.

So did I think I would avoid getting on this particular icy bandwagon?  I confess I did, more fool me. Recently a friend contacted me to long arm a Frozen quilt for her, in fact two, one for each of her granddaughters.  My first thought was oh great, as I believed myself above the commercialism of Disney. Wrong again !

I googled the pattern to see what I was in for.  It seemed pleasing enough however I could not find any detailed pictures to show the quilting to give me a clue of where to go.  Luckily my daughter showed me a few clips of the movie and a video of the song Let It Go and we were off.

I made a swirly wind pattern for the border, a regular repeat of the same for the inner borders, tiny swirls for around the snowflakes... the fabric is encrusted with glitter so I was keen to avoid trying to quilt over that.  I added the words Frozen, Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, Let It Go... Elsa, Anna, Olaf, Kristoff, Sven and Hans (at my friend's request), all in the inner blue borders.  Finally I silhouetted the panel in the middle with various patterns, avoiding the faces as I had avoided the snowflakes.  Quilting faces can be a dangerous territory, either working well enough or going horribly wrong.  Luckily my friend was in agreement on this and I quilted as close as I could get without entering the facial danger zone.

This turned out to be WAY more fun than I thought it would be, even to do it twice.

I had looked up the song Do You Want To Build A Snowman? a sad but catchy little song and I found myself humming it over and over (not unlike my son) as I quilted.  This quilt had all the hints I needed in the fabric and in the songs, I only had to open up my imagination to let everything play together.

I hope that the girls who receive these lovely quilts from their Grandma feel the whimsy and happiness I felt quilting them.