Well, the results of the snow dyeing were not quite what I expected but definitely not a dog's dinner!

The colours were very intense but rather too even.  One of the feaures of snow dyeing, perhaps the main reason for doing it, is that the resulting colours are not even but broken up by the snow crystals into its component parts.  I may have packed the snow too tightly around the fabrics so that the flakes were compacted and unable to disperse the colours.  However, the fabrics will be used in my work and I'll identify it as such, in due course.

In the meantime, here are the results so you can see what I mean:

My close friends, Rebecca and Jeff, live in Terlingua, Texas, about 10 miles from the Mexican border, so when they announced their wedding the present had to be a quilt!  Now, I have never been to Texas or the desert but wanted the quilt to reflect the colours of the landscape.  I think these pictures show that the colour choices were right....

This is one of the biggest quilts I have ever made at 9'x9'.  I expect my subconscious reasoning was that, as they lived in a tent in the desert, nights would be cold so they will need lots of quilt to wrap around their bodies to keep warm!  If you like facts and figures, I used 2 miles of thread to make the quilt, it is all cotton fabric with cotton batting.

Here is an embryonic quilt.  I tipped out my boxes and bags of scrap fabrics onto the floor and had a glorious time sorting through them, finding inspiration with unusual colour and print combinations.  The technique is shown in Rayna Gillman's book, Create Your Own Freeform Quilts.   Fabrics are layered and cut freehand without rulers which gives an organic quality once stitched together.   I am still playing around with placement of the blocks and have yet to decide on the final design but will keep working on it, now probably not until after February.