Snow is my nemesis!

I've completed Block two of A Journey to Light now. Sooooo much smoother than the first. Firstly, there was no snow to deal with. Secondly, I learned from some of my mistakes in the first block, and positioned my pieces on my own (as opposed to on top of the given placement guide). Again, I still need to complete the embroidery component (just the cardinal's beak)-- but other than that, it's done! Yay!


Then I moved on to block number three. Back to the snow. Agggghhh! In the first block, I discovered that my snow was rather sheer. Because I fused everything together before sticking it all on the background, my only fix could be made to the main snow bank. I just fused another piece of snow behind the main bank to give it more opacity. However, the layers of snow that sat atop that main bank still showed "shadows" of the fabrics behind them. At first, I was thinking I would just need to do it over. But then I decided I kind of liked that look.

For block three, I had the sudden vision of backing all my snow with muslin, thereby providing perfect opacity. Then I realized that would a.) look kind of strange next to a block where I didn't use that technique, and b.) the pieces would be pretty thick and heavy. As a result, I scrapped that plan for all but the main snowbank. Unfortunately, I had already cut out all of those backed pieces (this is in large part how I came to my determination that the two layers together were just too heavy). Sigh. So then I re-traced, and re-fused. Such time/energy/effort wasted. But, it's all about the learning process, right?

Speaking of snow... we got about four inches here this morning. It was beautiful, but it kept me from going out and about. Gah! Snow truly is my nemesis!