Snowflake - Neroli Henderson

I was really excited about this textile art quilt challenge - I love snowflakes to the point of having a largish one tattooed on my shoulder. However life has been getting in the way of challenges for this group lately - I've recently taken on the role of editor of Textile Fibre Forum magazine - an Aussie mag featuring artist profiles, exhibitions and best practice articles. I've just had my first issue go to print and it will be hitting stores in September but haven't yet got to the point where I'm very time effective at the role. I have been assured that my second and third issues will take much, much less time  – so I am hoping to be back on track in time for the next challenge. So far December is faster, so fingers crossed!

Due to the time constraints I only got to spend a few hours on this piece and it meant working in a rather less structured way to my normal (incredibly pedantic!) way of doing things.

I scattered Angelina Fibres out into a 30cm square and then layered metal flakes, plasticised irridescent confetti and more Angelina (Fantasy fibres). I folded this into four and then folded from the centre up like we used to do when kids when making Christmas decorations. I then freeform cut a design out of the folded wedge before unfolding to reveal my template. I didn't mark anything first which is a marked departure for someone who usually agonises about every single step in a construction.

I folded the sheet of Angelina fibres and metal flakes into this shape before cutting out the snowflake.

As it turned out I don't do so well without planning - the snowflake I liked though it was rather less delicate than I had been planning - but somehow even though I kept measuring the Angelina when fusing the sheet it came out bigger than 30cm by far! This is even though I rounded it up by a few cm first.

I had no time to create another piece so endeavoured to make it to scale of A3 - the only problem was the copper foil I had planned to back it onto was only A3 in size (30cm wide) and I only had one piece. I remembered I had purchased some coloured aluminium kitchen foil at Aldi a couple of years ago and used that (who knew you could sew aluminium foil together on a sewing machine - but you can!).

You can sew two pieces of aluminium foil together - who knew!

I then sewed the snowflake in place on some bag batting, debossed some patterning in around it and cut it down. Unfortunately (again!) the aluminium foil being so delicate had torn in a few places as well as a corner so I had to cut it down shorter than ideal and I used Lumiere paint in a similar gold to paint in all the areas where batting was visible.

I don't mind the result - it's was certainly quick and dirty and it's obviously not high art but it might make a pretty decent Christmas decoration :)

From this angle you can see the metal flakes embedded within the Angelina

- Neroli Henderson