Quilt Gallery

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Bow Ties and Butterflies and Broken Dishes

I am finally back with a few quilting tidbits. The first is the quilt I made with bow tie blocks from last year's swap organized by Barb Vedder over at Fun With Barb.


I'm glad I chose the modern version for the swap as the cheery colors will nicely brighten my basement sewing room. While making the swap blocks I was also sewing scraps into broken dishes blocks. At the time it didn't occur to me that I might use them together, but the bow ties ended up being perfect for the border. Since it's a busy quilt I kept the quilting to a simple zig zag pattern, not unlike what you might see on the big quilts movers use to wrap furniture, but on a bigger scale.


As I was scrolling through my photos for this post it occurred to me that my arrangement of bow ties makes then look a little like butterflies. Or maybe it was just the power of suggestion since a bunch of recent photos of butterflies popped up too. My favorite fall wildflower, Liatris, commonly known as gayfeather, has been growing profusely this year. It is clearly also favored by butterflies. Happy butterfly season!

Pipevine swallowtail on gayfeather

Southern dogface on gayfeather

Back to quilting. Now that bow tie quilt is about done, I am ready to receive this year's batch of swap blocks (in the broken dishes pattern!), which Barb promises are now in the mail. Here are my blocks just before I mailed them off to Barb. I'm eager to see what I get in return.


Finally, here is where I have gotten to on my little hand-pieced scrap quilt which I have been hand quilting in spare moments while at home.


I'm still not sure what I will put in the solid squares, but I'm leaning towards some sort of floral motif from my summer travels in China.



1 comment: