Snowflakes again

I have been trying to stay positive in spite of a small poorly child, the chance of another one (and myself) getting chicken pox any day now, and Siberian style weather instead of the balmy Barcelona holiday we had been expecting. It has not been easy at all and today I have been very close to losing the plot. Of the £474 we spent on the holiday, the insurance company say they should be able to repay us about £70. The poorly child is still spotty and infectious but is full of beans again which makes being housebound all the harder. We could go out and burn off some energy walking somewhere, except that it is so bitterly cold out there and one daft child has left her gloves and hat at school for the Easter holidays. It started snowing again this afternoon and despite the gloom it gave me an idea. I was thinking about the amazing snowflakes I saw the other day that were proper snowflake shapes, and I decided to ignore the children and get my sewing machine out. My good friend Laura had given me a piece of soluble fabric a while back and I have been trying to find a use for it ever since. I've never used it before so it was a bit of an unknown quantity. I stitched and stitched for about 20 minutes and ended up with this:-

Then I had to do some dissolving. Laura had written a little note saying "Solufleece cold water dissolvable" so I got a bowl of cold water and called the children over. The healthy child popped it in:

And bingo within a couple of minutes the fabric had disappeared:-

After a bit of drying, I have a bit of a higgledy-piggledy snowflake, about two inches across:-



I can kind of see the joy in this soluble fabric malarkey. If I could make a series of different sized snowflakes in varied designs, maybe with some metallic thread, they could look interesting sewn onto a piece of mottled felt. Nearly enough to pull me out of my gloom...