It’s a Snowflake!!!

No – not the kind outside – we have a decided lack of those.  But as I mentioned in my last blog post, I was going to get fabrics fused to make 3D Fabric Snowflakes with my Mom and Aunt when I see them in a few days.   The video is great and goes thru every step.  So I plugged in a movie and started cutting all my HeatnBond Ultra into squares.     Several people have emailed me and commented on various posts where I talked about these saying  that they were planning to make some.  I’ll share my tips, which worked for me, to make things a bit easier and less messy. ;-0

In the video it says to cut your fabric squares 7″ and also cut your HNBU (Heat N Bond Ultra) 7″ also.  After you’ve added the HNBU to each of the fabric squares, you then fuse them to each other to get two-sided fabric squares.  The video warns that you should use a pressing cloth because some of the adhesive may ooze out a bit as it bonds to itself.

These are the two fabrics I used for my first test run and I have two main tips after making it.

TIP #1:   I’m not fond of oozing stuff getting on my iron or ironing board so I changed the cutting sizes slightly to void that.  I cut the fabric squares 7″, I cut the HNBU 6-3/4″.    I centered the HNBU on each fabric square and fused.  I did put a pressing cloth under where I was pressing just in case but I never had anything adhere/ooze to my iron or the pressing cloth.

TIP#2:  Be sure after pressing the HNBU to each individual fabric square you let it cool completely before trying to adhere a pair of squares together.    If you don’t, even if it’s only slightly warm, it wants to stick together.  So after cooled, I carefully aligned the top edge of my fabrics wrong side together and then sort of rolled the top layer down so they lined up nicely and then pressed.

Since my HNBU was cut slightly smaller than the fabric squares I didn’t get any ooze and since you then trim the squares down it doesn’t matter than my HNBU square was smaller than the fabric one.  Per the video you trim the squares down to 6″ but I only trimmed mine down to 6.5″  I didn’t see the need to trim more off and  I happen to have a 6.5″ square ruler so that was perfect for centering on my fabric square and trimming away the edges.   The fabrics still felt a bit flimsy after pressing together so I wondered if they would really have the body needed to stand out nicely but after they cooled again, it was perfect.

Cutting the slits and then gluing it up — so easy and fun.  Here’s the finished snowflake which was made in no time.

  At the moment it’s hanging on the inside of my front door against the blinds and it just looks so cool.

Too bad I have to work tomorrow – I could see spending a day working on these.

As it is, I think I have the HNBU pieces cut for 11 more snowflakes or stars or whatever you want to call them. So I need to get busy figuring out what fabrics to use for the others and get the fusing done.  Hmmm.. 11 stars times 12 squares per star for the first fusing — yep that’s a whole lot of pressing. 🙂  Some of them will be New Year’s gifts for co-workers.  I plan to make them in all kinds of color combinations – not just wintery blues and creams etc.  They’ll look more like psychedelic snowflakes or flowers I think.