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 suppose that I am one of about half a million bloggers who have made a resolution to return to blogging in 2015.  Maybe I'll be the one to keep it up.

I think I'll jump right in with what I'm working on now.  My guild's yearly challenge in coming up in April.  I'm quite sure that no one in the guild pays any attention to my blog, so I think I can post photos here.  The theme this time is "Weather."  I've decided to make a wall hanging based on the title of an old children's book, "Where Does the Butterfly Go When It Rains?"

Here is a sketch I drew on graph paper from a photo I found online.

I was most worried about creating the butterfly, because if I couldn't pull that off, the whole thing would be a bust.  I've worked for two days on it.  I decided to hand applique the blue lines and embroider the rest in black on a soft yellow cotton.  I'll cut out about 1/4 inch around it all and hand applique it to the background.

I'm using a lovely navy batik for the background, green for the grass and leaves, and a soft lavender (which, unfortunately looks pink in the photo) for the flower and bud.  I'll scatter some small white flowers in the grass.

The diagonal lines in the sketch will be hand quilted lines of rain.  I bought some tiny navy/iridescent beads to put into about every fifth stitch of quilting to make raindrops and some clear/iridescent beads for the edges of the butterfly's wings and to sew scattered in the grass.

I'm not worried about the stems, leaves, and flowers, but I really don't have a good plan yet for the grassy area.  I'm thinking maybe a mix of applique and embroidery again.  I love a good, scary project.

I went on a quilt retreat with my guild.  It was so much fun!  There were thirteen of us in a lovely setting, with a cook who happily made me gluten-free meals, a massage therapist one day, and lots of sewing going on.

I started on my Christmas house quilt.  It was scary, because I had a picture, but I didn't know how to make it happen.  I got such good advice, especially from a woman who is working on a glorious crazy quilt.  I knew that I couldn't make that little cat out of fabric, or at least not in the way I usually applique, by hand with turned under edges.  The suggestion to embroider the cat with a satin stitch was perfect.  I admit here to using a very fine black marker to improve the outline of the cat.

Since the embroidery went so well, I got more advice about doing the wreath.  I used a feather stitch in two shades of green for the pine and little red berries of French knots.  I'm very happy with the results.  I did just a straight, black, machine stitch to define the windowpanes.  The next step is to hand applique the door and windows to the body of the house.

I also had a chance to finish the top of a T-shirt quilt that I've been putting off for a year or so.  It's for my public library.  The T-shirts were the prizes for six years of the children's summer reading program.  The thin sashing and borders are from a confetti print I bought at Hobby Lobby.  I'm hoping that the fabric stands up.  It feels fine, maybe a little stretchy.

I'm not sure yet how I will quilt it.  I'm thinking about a bubble-style meander in colors matching the t-shirts on the shirts themselves and something simple in black on the black sashing and the confetti-print sashing.

Once I give it to the library, it will be up to them what they do with it.  They may decide to display it in the storytime room, give it as a prize, or raffle it off.