This is my own Tula Pink Butterfly quilt. I'm calling it "Butterfly's Garden". I quilted one for Gillian awhile back. Coincidentally, mine was under construction at the time. I got the kit from Craftsy well over a year ago - I think sometime in 2016 - and started chipping away at it last spring. I put a push on and finished the top late in the fall but didn't get around to quilting it until after Christmas. I finally got the binding and a label on it for our long-arm group meeting yesterday so it's on the list of completed UFO's. 😎
It's mostly Tula Pink fabric, obviously, but I did add a few stash fabrics that worked. Also, I bought more of the background fabric for the borders. I liked the fabric in the kit - but not for the border. I wanted the butterfly to be the main event and felt that anything other than the background would detract from that. I also added an extra six inches on each side because I may want to actually use this one on a bed! In the end, it's a huge quilt - not quite king, but certainly a generous queen.
I am often asked how I figure out how I am going to quilt a quilt. The concept for this quilt is "garden".... keep going for more explanation ....
Because its so big, I don't have a good space in my house to get a decent shot of the whole quilt, draping it over some furniture is the best I can do (below). Lee D, in our long-arm group, took a pix of it yesterday so I'm stealing her pix (thanks Lee!), which is the pix above.
My idea for this quilt was that it would be a garden, hence the name. The design along the bottom border is adapted from a book of Art Deco wrought iron designs. The idea is that it's a wrought iron fence around the garden (below).
Of course there will be other butterflies and some dragonflies in the garden.... and flowers.... and leafy things (feathers).
For this quilt, I started by ditching all the blocks in the butterfly using DecoBob thread (most of the rest of the quilting was with Glide) . Then I quilted the antennae. It took a couple of tries to get them more or less symmetrical as I'm not computerized - this is one place where it would be handy. But in the end I like the organic result of not-quite-perfect. I pinned the borders down as I went. Once I got to the bottom of the butterfly wings, I went back and quilted the butterfly blocks.
When the butterfly was completely quilted (I did change colours to blend with the fabric in most cases), I did the half inch outline all the way around. Next - I stitched in the outlines for the "wrought iron fence". Then I stitched in the butterflies and dragonflies. Note that I used coloured thread for these motifs. All the rest of the background/border quilting is with white.
I gradually worked my way around the background and border, filling it in with what I hope turns out to be fairly balanced. I don't usually sketch out what I'm going to quilt - it's all in my head so I just hope it works because all I can see at any one time is what is between the roll bars.
A note about the grid quilting. First - I measure it and draw it on with air erase pen. Second - it's ruler work. Third - I often use a grid as a background when an area needs to be quilted but I don't want to put a busy design in that place. In the pix above, as an example, if I had put feathers where the grid is, the dragonfly would disappear. The grid is a sort of "neutral" quilting design that goes in "behind" a motif or feature design.
Above - can't see it very well but there's a "lattice" running up along each side.
Above - the "lattice" on the right hand side - the diamond shapes.
And that's my Butterfly's Garden.
