Thursday, October 16, 2014

Ladybugs and Dragonflies

I've been quilting some fabulous quilts in the past few weeks. Some of them are included in this post.

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.