I made this one just because I wanted to, but I’m not sure what to do with it as there are no little girls in my family any more.
I had some lovely ‘sparkly’ fabrics in small amounts, and decided to use my embroidery machine to appliqué large butterflies. I designed and digitised the appliqué pattern myself, and each one was sewn directly onto a plainer fabric (also shiny). They were made slightly ‘puffy’ by including a layer of very thin, fusible vilene wadding in-between. This was very effective, but it made it a bit awkward later at the quilting stage.
For the alternate squares I bought a pretty butterfly fabric – except for two of the corners, where one of the original fabrics was used, and a machine-embroidered lace butterfly attached. For the backing I chose another pretty butterfly fabric, with larger butterflies. I was able to match the pattern when joining the seam – so it looks like one large piece.
Using the remaining fabrics, including some not used on the central piece, I added six one-inch borders, and the binding.
As mentioned above, the actual quilting was tricky, because I didn’t want to spoil the appliquéd butterflies – they needed to stand out. So I used a template to place stand-alone stylised flower motifs on the corners of the squares (missing the appliqués), and a smaller motif on each of the squares without the appliquéd butterflies, and quilted them – a difficult task for me, as I’m not very skilled at free-motion quilting. But hey, sometimes you’ve just got to dive right in and do these things, don’t you? I am reasonably happy with the result, and am hoping that my next try at free-motion quilting will be an improvement – or at least easier.
