Thursday, August 24, 2017

Agnes's Butterflies

Agnes has been busy appliqueing again!  She's getting to be the expert!  She brought me this quilt - brightly coloured butterflies on a white background to quilt.  Like her dandelion quilt, this one is basically a wholecloth quilt with appliqued butterflies.

How to quilt such a thing?  I decided the butterflies were travelling through a garden so lots of "organic" designs.  I challenged myself not to use a ruler and I think I succeeded in this.  I also thought I'd try out some of the filler designs in my new book - "Quilted Textures from A to Zen" by Bethanne Nemesh.  

I started by stitching in a wavy line at an angle on each side to make a "path" for the butterflies to "fly" through.  Then on each opposite corner section, I stitched random wavy lines to make irregular closed shapes - I would quilt something in each of these - something different if I could think of that many different things....  in the channel I quilted big paisley feathers - see Angela Walters video. This was my first crack at them - they turned out all right I think.  To fill the rest between the channels, I didn't want to detract from the feathers so I did a vertical wavy line design that I found in my Christina Cameli book.

So.... random shapes, each filled with a different filler, feathers and vertical wavy lines.  Easy, right???  Oh - and I also didn't want it to be plain white everywhere so I changed up the thread colour. Some darker shades - close to the butterfly colours, then some lighter shades of the same colours. I actually wanted to use some metallic thread but couldn't get it to run in my machine, so my Plan B was some green/yellow variegated thread.  Click on the pix to see the close up - it's hard to see because so white.



















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