How to Quilt an Olaf Frozen Quilt Panel

Yes, Olaf is in the house! I found this delightful Frozen quilt panel and realized it would be the perfect gift for my young niece and a great way to practice machine quilting.

I found this project to be really fun and a great learning experience. The challenge is the same as every quilt: how do we quilt it? Where do the design go and what will look best in which space?

Having hundreds of designs to choose from can really make it hard to pick just a few designs to work with. I knew Olaf didn’t need to be elaborately or densely quilted. In fact, I had a bit of a time crunch on this project and needed to have him off the machine in just a day or two, which meant the quilting design needed to be fast and not fussy.

What makes a design fussy? Lots of thread color changes, thread breaks, and dense quilting. Thread breaks and color changes have long been the bane of my existence. It’s both time consuming and distracting to stop, pull out your bobbin and re-thread the top of the machine. Dense quilting is also S…L…O…W. If I’d quilted this on a wall hanging style scale (1/8 inch between the lines of quilting) I’d probably be getting Olaf finished when my niece is graduating from college. Not an option!

For that reason, I quilted 99% of this Olaf quilt panel with white thread. I intentionally choose designs like Stippling and Tangle of Lights that could be quilted with minimal thread breaks. I also quilted this panel on a 1/2 inch scale and left most of Olaf un-quilted so he puffs up nicely on the surface.

I also added snowflakes! Lots and lots of snowflakes were marked on the quilt surface using a stencil I cut from an AccuQuilt snowflake die. These shapes took up space and added to the overall design.

All told, it took around 4 hours to quilt this panel from start to finish and I couldn’t be more pleased! It’s super soft and cuddly, but the quilting definitely added a beautiful additional texture to the surface. Watch how this design was planned, then quilted in this free video:

Here’s the list of materials I used to transform a single 1 yard Olaf panel into a quilt:

– Olaf Panel for the top
– Craft sized wool batting (Quilter’s Dream Wool)
– 1 yard blue solid fabric for backing
– 3 strips of white fabric 
– Snowflake stencils or templates (optional)
– Basting Pins and Pinmoors
– White and Black Isacord Thread 
– Machine quilting gloves

About halfway through quilting my Olaf quilt I hit a little speed bump of indecision. I made the mistake of stopping and analyzing the quilt and I wasn’t completely thrilled with the designs. It was still less than half quilted and looked a bit blotchy and weird and I started to feel like I’d made the wrong choices.

Do you do this to yourself? Is this part of the reason why it’s hard to pick machine quilting designs?

Instead of picking up a seam ripper or chucking the quilt in the trash, I just kept quilting. This is the learning experience I think is most key to this quilt – who cares if your quilt isn’t perfect? FINISHED is better than perfect!

I also found as I quilted more of the panel and the design emerged that I really liked what I’d picked. It just took a bit more time to see the machine quilting designs coming together and see the cool effect it created.

So my advice to you with any quilt project is this: Pick some designs and jump right in. If halfway through you feel worried you made the wrong choice, keep stitching. Judging a quilt by it’s half quilted state is silly because you have no perspective of the overall design.

Keep quilting and if in the end you hate the quilt, at least it’s done and you learned something! Win win in my opinion!

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day