Butterfly Garden

Earlier this year, Northcott put out a call for quilts for their QuiltCon booth. As one that's always designing new patterns and constantly has multiple sketches and ideas running around my head, I answered their call and submitted a fun, whimsical, yet modern quilt design, which they accepted. I used a bunch of Northcott fabrics along with a tone on tone black print to come up with the quilt you see below, Butterfly Garden.

I was designing a few baby quilts for a soon-to-be baby girl in the family and this was one of my sketches. I ran with it and love the outcome. The color palette was inspired by my printer cartridge. It's amazing where you can find inspiration these days.

I quilted this quilt to look like the butterflies were flying in the wind using some simple wavy lines. Whenever I quilt a quilt, I always pick my quilting with intention, whether that quilting is complex or simple. In this case, I thought some complex quilting motifs would distract from the pattern. I thought about quilting some antenna on the butterflies, but decided against it at the last minute.

After giving a talk at a local quilt guild recently and previewing this quilt, I was encouraged to draft up a pattern for this quilt. If you'd like to make your own Butterfly Garden quilt, hop on over to Craftsy and download the pattern. If you make one, send me a picture, I'd love to see it.

QuiltCon opens this morning, so once I get a good shot of the Northcott booth and this hanging, I'll be sure to include a picture in some of my QuiltCon posts.

Kaleidoscope BOM - Month 2

Where did January go? It feels like I just introduced the Kaleidoscope BOM a week or two ago and we're already launching month two.

Month two has some really awesome blocks in it. This first block would be amazing repeated in a quilt. I'd be interested in seeing the movement that the light teal would work that way. As just a single block, I feel like I'm on Space Mountain at Disney World, just zooming into space. 

The second block for this month is a bright and cheery star kaleidoscope block. I really like how the white background intersects the orange star in this block to give it a great effect. I love star blocks that are framed up, and the use of the same color of fabrics in two different tones really has a nice effect here. 

I can't wait to see what you make with these blocks. If you want to participate in the BOM, download the blocks on Craftsy here. Don't forget to hashtag your blocks using #kaleidoscopeBOM.