Insects seem to be popular! Kristie did a ladybug quilt and I used dragonflies as a quilting motif in one of my quilts. I'll include a tutorial on how I did those if you're interested.
First up is a little quilt I made - paper airplanes. I wanted to quilt it such that the planes look like they are blasting through space.
This is another of my quilts - made for my daughter-in-law's mother, who likes to get manicures. DIL also told me that her mom really likes dragonflies. Since I was using solids, I decided to incorporate dragonflies into the quilting.
This would be a "modern" quilt because of the use of solids and the not traditional block design. Typically I would quilt something like this with a more modern style of quilting, but because I was using dragonflies as a motif, I thought something more whimsical would be appropriate. I put a dragon fly on each bottle to sort of look like a label or logo - and I placed dragonflies in the border.
Here's how I did the dragonflies:
First I found a few illustrations of dragonflies using Google (one of the best quilting tools!), then I right-sized them and printed them and cut them out.
Each time I wanted a dragonfly, I chose the one I wanted to use, then drew around it using an air soluble marker.
This provides and outline or "skeleton". From there - it's all freehand, baby! It's like drawing with thread. I stitched around the dragonflies three or four times so they show up a bit.
I echoed around the border dragonflies, then filled in around them.
As for the ladybugs, I used a very similar process:
First I drew a registration line in the direction I wanted the bug to face. This is the bug's centre line.
Then I placed my 2 inch circle template in the desired spot using the line as the centre and stitched around the template - twice - so the bugs will show up a bit.Next - stitch the "V" shape for the wings. I used a little straight line ruler to do that. The centre line is used again as the centre for the "V". (Stitch this twice as well.)
The head is next - again oriented on the centre line. Again - stitch twice.
Finally - stitch the antenna - twice. Voila! Ladybug!
This is the way the pattern showed the quilt being quilt. Meanders, flowers and ladybugs.