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.