The top for the butterfly quilt is finished!  I added legs and feelers to the butterfly and a stem for the flower bud this evening.

I used a stem stitch with two strands of floss for the butterfly appendages, the same gray as the markings.

 I used one strand of gray and one strand of green in the needle for the grass.  The little star flowers were three strands of white with an iridescent purple bead in the middle of each one.

Now it's time to quilt!  I'll be making parallel diagonal lines, all running from the upper right to the lower left to suggest rain.  At the moment, I'm thinking of making them 1 inch apart, but I may go closer.  I'll add iridescent navy blue beads to the rain lines and have some clear "raindrops hanging from the butterfly and possibly the flowers and leaves.

I really do think I'll get this finished for the April challenge.

I'm glad to be back to work on my butterfly quilt.  I have the butterfly on and embroidered, this time with gray thread, and I've started the grassy base.

For the grassy base, I've made five thick blades of grass from my gray/green/lavender batik.  I'm pretty pleased with the points on those narrow pieces.  I'm going to add at least twenty skinny blades of grass with embroidery.  I'm using one strand of green and one strand of gray in the needle.  I'll scatter tiny white embroidered flowers with a lavender bead center through the grass.  I think it will be close to my vision!

 

I also took a crazy quilt workshop at my guild on Sunday.  I went to the thrift shop downtown and bought a velvet scarf and a velvet children's dress.  I used the scarf in this block, but I couldn't quite make myself cut into the sweet little dress, which still has the tags on it.  Velvet is a son-of-a-gun to work with - especially when you're sewing it to silk.  Next time, I'll hand stitch those kinds of seams.  Our teacher, one of our guild members who did an excellent job, told us to take a photo of the unadorned block for reference.  Here's mine:

 

The center is brown velvet, and the upper right hand corner is the velvet lining of the scarf.  Most of the other pieces are silk.  I don't much like the look of it now.  I was trying to be brave with color.  I'm hoping that it will improve with piles of embellishment.   I have no idea what I'll do with this block, whether it will be a stand-alone or the first block in a big quilt.

I've been away on a quilt retreat with some members of my guild.  It was in a lovely setting - a Franciscan retreat house just a few minutes from my house that I didn't even know was there.  The cook made me delicious gluten-free food, and the brothers were kind and eager for us to enjoy ourselves.  They let me light a candle in their chapel even though I'm not Catholic.

Of course, the main events were quilting, wine, and chocolate.  I gained two pounds in three days.  I did bind the t-shirt quilt I'm making as a donation to my public library.  The six t-shirts are prizes from the summer reading club for kids at the library.  A few of them are from the years when I was the children's librarian there.  The reading club attracts hundreds of kids, and you can see these t-shirts being worn all over town.

I also got some work done on the One Block Wonder that I am turning into my life's work.  I forgot to take a photo, but I'll post one soon.

The work of some of the other attendees was great.  I'm enthralled by this hexie crazy quilt by my friend Betty.

Dana is adding trapunto to this beauty.  She uses soluble thread to add a layer of batting behind the design, cuts away the excess fabric, places the top on a layer of batting and backing, and then quilts along the soluble thread line.

A lot of people were making bags.  They like to go home from a retreat with a project made there.  As the tortoise, I prefer to plug along on a project that I love, even if I have very little to show for it at the end.  I wish I could have taken my butterfly wall hanging to work on, but the retreat was for our guild members, who aren't supposed to see it before the competition day in April.

I'm glad that I can finally post a bit about the secret project I was working on.  I'm part of a private online quilting group that started a few years ago.  We keep in touch on Facebook and meet in person once a year at a retreat.  We come from Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida.  One of our dearest members was going through a hard time, so we decided to make her a lap quilt with heart blocks made by us all. 

The blocks were sent to me along with some snowballs made by a few members, and it was my job to put the quilt together and quilt it on Big Mama, my longarm.  Here are a few of the blocks.  Aren't they charming?!

I decided to rely on my favorite - hand applique.  Here's mine:

I interspersed the 15 heart blocks with the snowballs.

Then I chose some border fabrics

and a flannel backing to make it cuddly.

Putting it together was sometimes challenging.  One woman's 6 1/2 inches is another woman's 6 1/4 inches, but I got it all to work.  Here's the finished top.

Diane commented on my last post that I could make index-card windows to audition different spots on my fabric for the three butterfly parts,  I followed her advice and chose a darker gray background for the back wing and body and a lighter shade with lots of spots for the front wing.

Today I finished appliqueing the bud and flower and pressed the fabric pieces around the freezer paper for the butterfly.  I laid the butterfly on the background to see how it looks so far.  I haven't attached the butterfly or done any embroidery yet, but I think it's going to be much better in this fabric.  (I still struggle to photograph the colors in their correct values.)

The bud will be connected to the stem with a slim embroidered stem.  I'm thinking of mixing green and lavender threads in that little stem and using two shades of gray thread for the lines on the butterfly.

I haven't posted in a while, not because I haven't been sewing but because I've been working on a secret project for a friend.  When it is delivered, I'll post about it here.

Finally, I'm back to working on the butterfly-in-the-rain challenge quilt!  I've been fairly happy with the appliqued stem and leaves, but it's so hard to get points on those skinny leaves.  After the very close work on stitching those, I took a step back and looked at the whole picture.  The stem, leaves, and flowers looked lovely until I threw on the yellow butterfly.  Yuck!

The other colors and designs were so subtle, that the butterfly looked like a cartoon character.  Even the one drawn on graph paper with a pencil looked better.  Although the yellow was the palest shade I had, it ruined the rainy effect I had created with the mottled stems and leaves and grayish lavender flower.

My friend Andrea and I had planned a field trip to Olde City Quilts in Burlington, NJ, today, so I took this block along, and she (and the friendly staff at the shop) helped me pick out this fabric.  I never would have chosen it, or even looked at it, myself.  I was thinking of plain white or gray.  The white would have been too stark and not improved the situation.  And, really, who wants a gray butterfly?  This is a batik with a white and gray background and scattered dots of turquoise and lavender.  I bought a quarter yard to give me lots of background shades and dots to choose from. 

Here's a close-up.  The color is somewhere between these two photos.

I think that I'll divide the butterfly pattern into three parts: the two wings and whatever that other piece is that hangs down.  The body?  I also think I'll switch to a more subtle embroidery thread than black.  Maybe charcoal gray. 

It feels a little crazy to do the whole butterfly again, but I have a lot more time to put into this, especially the quilting with beads, so I want to like it when it's finished.  Snow is predicted for tomorrow, so I'm hoping for lots of time to remake the butterfly.

I'm happy finally to be ready to put some of this picture on the background.  I wasn't pleased with my big lumpy flower.

I decided to make four petals instead.  I think this will look better.

I really liked the exact curve of the stem, so I had to figure out how to transfer it from the sketch to the fabric.  I decided that I could cut out the stem and then use my Bohn ceramic chalk pencil inside of the hole I cut to make the inside line of the curve.

Hey, ho!  Here we go!