Once in a Blue Moon - Part Two

This is the 2nd part of the blog about making the "Once in a Blue Moon" quilt with battery operated LED lights.

I glue basted the edges of the cats and mouse and did a little bit of highlighting with white paint.  I'm not sure that the white will show in the finished piece, but I felt that it gave the cats a look of moon glow.  Glue has become one of my best friends for applique.  This makes the edge turning so quick and it's easy to machine applique through the dried glue.

I added some batting and then machine appliqued the cats and mouse, and added the moon without the extra layer of batting.

The tricky part of adding the lights was next.   I knew generally where to run the lights for optimum effect.  To make sure that I placed the lights correctly, I traced over the top onto freezer paper.  What if the lights looked like constellations,?  Sounded good.  They were sketched onto the freezer paper.  Then the lights got taped to the freezer paper to hold them in place.  This part really helped to keep the wires flattened so that I could sew them into place.

A layer of tulle was laid on top of the lights and hand sewn to all of the wires.  When it was all sewn, I removed the freezer paper and tape.  Then the whole thing got flipped over onto the back of the quilt top and a second layer of tulle was placed on top of that.  Then I hand stitched the tulle and lighting layer to the back of the top with very fine silver thread.  This was to enable me to see where the lights were while quilting so as not to sew over the top of the electric cable or the lights themselves.