Judy's Butterfly Garden

 

It is such a delight to see a butterfly flitting around the yard. I don’t have a lot of flowers in my yard, but the other day my 3 year old grandson and I were blessed to see a beautiful butterfly swoop by us. It was in a hurray, but we both saw it and enjoyed that little spot of color fly by us.

The large butterfly is a leftover from a mandala quilt I am working on. It didn’t turn out perfect for that quilt, but it works fine for this one. The way I made it was to use freezer paper for my template and cut out the sections of the butterfly. I thought about putting silk, satin, or lace under the cutouts, but I looked up from where I was sitting and saw a bag of Angelina fibers. I played with laying out the different colors on top of each other so that there are gold fibers, holographic ones, and some darker ones to give it interest. Once I had the fibers laid out I fused them together into a large sheet. From there I chose where I would get the prettiest look on the butterfly and cut that out to fuse onto the back of the butterfly.

I had another piece of fabric that had the other butterflies on them which made it easy to fuse and cut them out. 

The flowers were hours of struggle. I took down my box of fused fabric and just started cutting up slivers of fabric. Boy, was that ugly! Then I went back to my fun petal shapes and the flowers were more like the summer time flowers I grew up with. I tried different colored fabrics and on this small piece it was too much, so I used the same fabric on all three flowers. I truly only had a small piece of it that fabric and it has been a favorite for many years. Now that fabric is all gone, but it is in some of my favorite quilts.

The grass blades are slivers from a hand dyed piece I made many years ago. The background is an ombre fabric made by Caryl Bryer Fallert  called “Essentials” for Benartex.

I read this quote and thought it was a good reminder for us during this pandemic. We are definitely going through a change that we didn't choose. "We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty." ---Maya Angelou

Sara's Translate

When I first thought of translation I thought of the conversion of one language to another or from one symbol to another. My next thought was translational symmetry - the movement of an object from one place to the next without rotation. This concept reminded me of a design exercise I did when in a 2d design class when we were given sheets of printed r's and e's and were asked to create a composition-I decided to work with a simple shape. I started out making a freezer paper stencil and using Shive paint sticks on black fabric,That done, I decided that I wanted something with more contrast and I had just finished a workshop with Esterita Austin so I decided to use Mistyfuse on fabric and use fusible appliqué . I cut out 3 sizes of small circles out of the fused fabric using my accuquilt die cutter, I arranged lines of translated red circles and liked the result. I went back in with green circles on an angle to add visual interest.

I decided to quilt this using "matchstick" quilting that I had seen on some modern quilts - closely spaced lines that are roughly but not quite parallel. A 12 inch quilt seems like a much better place to try ou a technique than a larger quilt - especially one that is so time consuming! I'm not sure I like the effect enough to use on an entire quilt but I may use it in some areas of quilting where my overall quilting is fairly dense. I was glad to be able to try it out .