Butterflies & More

 The South Beach Botanic Garden is located not far from my son's family. They love it, so I gift them with a family membership each year.

They had a butterfly exhibit there while I was visiting. Most places now have areas designed for photos. We should all be butterflies!

Not many people were lucky enough to be the landing spot for a butterfly.

This was as close as I got, but it was still fine by me.

They have lovely flowers, an entire bleeding heart garden, and a stunning rose garden, but I find myself attracted to the Cactus garden.

They were in flower, which was really cool to see.

We had some terrific food. Here my DGG is taking a picture of my son and DIL.

While there I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories **** to my DGD. I really didn't need to. She is able to read very well. Once I stopped to take a drink of water, and when I tried to find my place to resume reading, she pointed it right out to me! It's a fun book, and when we got to the end of one chapter and she said, "Do we have to stop? Can you please keep reading?" I knew she liked the book as much as I do.

It's always fun to see quilts I made a long time ago. This is the Petals quilt I made in 2015. I slept under the Dinosaur quilt!

Before I left, I set up my DGD's iPad so she could FaceTime with me with just the push of a button. As you can see she is getting tall. She'll be nine next week, and I'm pretty sure that the next time I see her she'll be taller than me.

I had a grand time.

**** this from Amazon about the book: 

Immediately forget any preconceptions you may have about Salman Rushdie and the controversy that has swirled around his million-dollar head. You should instead know that he is one of the best contemporary writers of fables and parables, from any culture. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a delightful tale about a storyteller who loses his skill and a struggle against mysterious forces attempting to block the seas of inspiration from which all stories are derived.

“This is, simply put, a book for anyone who loves a good story. It’s also a work of literary genius.” —Stephen King

Let It Go!

 

Sometimes you're so busy you forget to really look at the things right in front of you. This is "Life is Tweet," my attempt at a row quilt I made almost ten years ago. It lives in my master bathroom and I walk past it several times a day. I sometimes forget it's there. What a shame!

It has my fun liberated birds (tutorial here), my butterflies, (tutorial here), and my asterisk flowers (tutorial here), and some wonky hearts.

I meant to have all the elements lined up in a row, but the birds refused to cooperate. The hearts seemed to bounce around with love and excitement, and just couldn't be contained. The butterflies wanted to fly (duh), and the asterisks simply lifted up into the air above.

Well.

What was I to do? I let them, because sometimes that's the way an idea works. You have a plan and what happens on the design wall changes and you have to change with it. Had I made the quilt I had originally intended to make, this quilt would have been boring and stuffy.

The quilt is enhanced with Chris Ballard's spectacular free motion hand guided quilting. It's a smallish quilt, 38" x 45". Just goes to show you can get a lot of bang for your buck out of 29 blocks.

I tell my students all the time that at some point the quilt they are making is going to start making demands. "What the quilt wants," I tell them, "the quilt should get." 

I have a lot of non-quilt related stuff going on and since I haven't been in the studio for a few days, I thought you'd enjoy this little blast from the past.

Black Butterflies

 I liked the black butterflies in the Ghastly fabric, and wanted to use them in the quilt somehow
.

I had made a black butterfly for the quilt back in April, but I had made it with a white background, so it didn't really fit.

So I decided to make a black butterfly for the signature panel of the Not Paper Pieced quilt.

I think this is going to work. Now I just need to add the date.


If you want to make your own butterflies, you can get my tutorial here. 

If you are interested in learning how to make  free-pieced letters that don't use templates or patterns and AREN'T PAPER PIECED... you can get that tutorial here. Both tutorials are instant downloads so you can get started right away.

Revisiting the Butterfly...

In 2008, I devised a way to make a free pieced butterfly that was easy to make and had a lot of possibility for variations.

I published it as a tutorial in late 2012, and over the years I have made a few changes in how I make them.

Here are some butterflies I made for No Rules for Julie.

I figured out how to make some pretty cool butterflies.

This butterfly actually came about because I made a mistake and thought, hmm... what if I...?

Now that I have written several other tutorials, I decided to update the butterfly tutorial and give it the same "look" as the others. The original was portrait orientation, the others are landscape. As I looked through it I realized that some of the photographs could be improved, so the other night I made a few butterflies and took lots of step by step pictures.

Next I worked my way through the tutorial, replacing pictures, rearranging some pages and clarifying the text.

I'm happy with it. You can find it here, on my Etsy shop. Like all my other tutorials it is an instant download so you can get started right away.

NOTE: If you purchased the butterfly tutorial in the past, email me, tell me when you bought the tute and your Etsy name, or some other way I can prove you purchased it, and I will email you the new version for no charge.

The Colorado Quilt at Home in Colorado

The Colorado Quilt has arrived in the high desert of Colorado and now it lives on P & J's bed.

My extremely loquacious brother (sarcasm mine) sent this photo yesterday with the following comment:

"This is one beautiful quilt. Thank you so much."






If you want to make birds like these, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download so you can get started right away. I have a tutorial for the butterflies too.

Happy Birthday to Me!

When I was making birds last winter, I was a little blue around Christmastime. As it turns out, that was when my DS and DIL discovered they were pregnant. I made this bird to represent me. Bright wings, hot pink legs and a stylish beak. I gave myself a blue body because I was a bit blue.

I'm not blue any longer, and I'm out of the funk I was in for a few months, so that's good.

It's my birthday and if you order a copy of my Lynne's Liberated Birds Tutorial today I'll throw in the butterfly tutorial for free.  Now you'll have to make sure I have your email address because the butterfly tute will come from me, not Etsy. (And since it's my birthday I'll be busy most of the day, and I will send them out tomorrow.)

 And since I apparently have to say it AGAIN, these birds and butterflies are NOT PAPER PIECED!!!! I think I am going to make a small quilt that says "I am NOT paper pieced."

OK! Happy Birthday to me! Buy the Bird Tute, get the Butterfly Tute free!

Birds, Butterflies & Asterisks, Oh My!

I'll be at Quilted Threads today, teaching a class on the birds, asterisk flowers, hearts and my free-pieced butterflies. 

We're going to have fun.  I've got something going in the slow-cooker for dinner tonight, so dinner will be ready when I get home. Whee!

Life Is 'Tweet!

It's officially a flimsy! And it has a name, "Life is 'Tweet!"

It is 40-1/2" x 47-1/2" (102.8 cm x 120.6 cm)

I'll take a picture of it outside tomorrow.

Almost a Flimsy

It's almost a flimsy. Everything is sewn together. I need to add a couple of inches of WOW all around, and then square it off and it will be Finito.  

Julie suggests I keep unquilted flimsies around to show my students. She says that it's helpful for students to see how my work is put together. They can see that when they look at the wrong side of my quilts. This won't get quilted until my class is over.

I cannot tell you how happy I will be when this thing is off my design wall. It has been bugging me for some time.

(BTW, the top edge of the quilt looks wobbly because it is on the bias, and I've stay stitched the edge to keep it from stretching. It does look funny, but once I sew the border strips on, it will be fine.)

Back to Butterflies and Birds

OK, I am back to making the sample for the Birds & Butterflies class. This is what I have so far. Now I have to add the asterisks. 

As you can see I haven't lined up the elements so far (Partly because I think that would be boring). I like that the elements in each row bounce up and down a bit. I also like the feeling of impending movement.  So...

There's this version. The quilt seems to want more than just five asterisk flowers, so I have made an assortment.  Here they are floating away very slightly.

Here I have rearranged the asterisks a bit, and let one of them float higher than all the others. I think that topmost asterisk is a bit too high.

In this version I've lowered that top asterisk just a bit, and I think it's better. There might be a tiny bit too much space at the top too.

I'm trying to avoid making a big quilt, and I guess I'm failing. But I'm happy with this and it will give my students a lot of examples of birds, butterflies, hearts and asterisks. I think it will be quite lovely when it is quilted, and all that empty space has lots of possibilities.

Potential

The other day, while I was doing something that wasn't sewing, I had an idea.

So I had to give it a try.

I think this looks OK, but the "legs" are too long. The idea has potential, so I may tinker with it a bit more.

On the flimsy front, another idea bit the dust and needs a re-do. The butterflies will not be the top row. I do not want anything heavy at the top. I want some of these elements to "float" like bubbles in the air, so the lightest elements (lightest visually), the asterisk flowers, will be the top row.  The problem with this part of the butterfly row was they were all tilted too much in one direction. The two butterflies on the right will stay together, but the angle of the orange butterfly will change.

At least that's what I think right now. Come later tonight when I actually resew them together it might change.

Decisions, Decisions...

Hmm... This one?

Or this one?

I'm pretty sure I know which one I'll do.  It's a sample for the class on Birds, Butterflies, Asterisk flowers and Hearts I'll be teaching at Quilted Threads in July.

In other  BIG NEWS.... My best pal Julie will be visiting for a few days next week. We'll be going down to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see  the Quilts and Color exhibit. We'll be talking about quilts and doing a little sightseeing. We'll also be eating good food, good ice cream and doing lots of gabbing. And of course we'll go fabric shopping at QT.  So I've got to get everything ready so I can enjoy my time off.

Basic Butterfly

Here's a butterfly before I've trimmed the bottom wings. Right now this butterfly looks very upright and a little stiff.

 I've trimmed about three-fourths of an inch from the bottom, but the difference in how the butterfly looks is amazing. I prefer my butterflies to be wide like this.

You can buy my butterfly tutorial at my Etsy shop, here.

All Lined Up

So knowing my penchant for avoiding tradition at all costs, who among you would have predicted that I would end up liking this arrangement, with everything lined up. Well, more or less lined up.

Still though, the goal is to attract attention to these and to entice customers to sign up for a class to learn how to make them.

The layout yesterday was confused. This is a lot more straightforward, but it is by no means final. I am happy with only one butterfly (I'll let you guess which one), and I really like the crazy little heart that's bouncing higher than the rest. The asterisks are fine, but I have two two-toned ones that are so subtle you can hardly tell they are two-toned. (Oops). I like the birds, but I don't think these four work well together.

So I have some work to do, but that's OK. It's the kind of work I like to do. 

One note: "Free-piecing" is a technique of construction, not of design. Yogi Berra famously said "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else."  Very true. Working improvisationally means you make it up as you go, but it doesn't mean you are stuck with it if you don't like the direction it's taking. You get to change course. You get to decide where you'll end up. 

I always start with some kind of plan or idea, and working this way helps me figure out what it is about the plan that works, and what doesn't. I love the zest, the verve, the unlikely results. I love the surprises I find along the way. If I planned every last detail out before I cut into a piece of fabric, it might be "perfect" but it could be stilted, boring, predictable, dull and worst of all "overworked."

Philippe Petit (he's the one who walked a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974) says the point of Art is to make it look effortless. "I practice very hard to make it look easy." 

Well, yes. I work very hard to make my work look completely spontaneous, fresh and lively. It isn't without effort, but it doesn't mean I don't like the work it takes to get there.




(btw, I remember Petit's famous walk when it happened. The DVD "Man on Wire", the story of the walk is awesome, thrilling and terrifying. He's still alive.)

Butterfly or Moth?

Mistakes can be learning experiences if we let them.  This "moth" is the result of my attempt at trying to make a butterfly with "eye spots" on the wings.

This was the original butterfly (above). It looked odd, but when I turned it upside down, it looked better.  The body was the wrong way around, but I removed the wings and turned the body upside down, then resewed the wings to the body. Now it looks a lot better (top photo).

Don't be afraid to push your ideas around a little. Try not to let them get the best of you.



btw, the Butterfly Tutorial is complete. It is being tested by a couple of my quilting friends, and may be released next week. It will be in PDF format, and available by email request only for a small fee.

Butterfly Tutorial

Some of you may have noticed I removed the free pieced butterfly tutorial from my blog.  I'm reworking it, and it will be available as a PDF file soon.

Flipped

Sometimes you get a great idea, and when you execute it, it doesn't look the way you envisioned it.  Such it is with this green butterfly. I really did want it to look like eyes, but this shape is all wrong.

So I tried again.  The upper part of the butterfly fabric is now a slightly different fabric, and the eyes are at the bottom.  Actually, I'm not quite happy with this one either. It looks really stiff.

This one looks better in an odd sort of way.  Look familiar? This is the first butterfly, turned upside down.

Stuff like this happens sometimes, and you have to be willing to go with it. Or at least be willing to set it aside for a while and move to something different.

More Butterflies

Of these five, three are definite YES, one is a No, and one is a Maybe.

But which are which? Care to guess?

Butterfly Variation

For guess who, on guess what?