Butterfly Kisses

Remember the sweet kisses your child fluttered on your face as a child?  I loved those kissy-kisses from my boys.  Since they are all grown up and getting butterfly kisses from their own daughters, or will be soon anyway, I can say that's been a long time since I got butterfly kisses.  Of course, I miss those sweet moments.  Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go back or anything, but I do think of them fondly, like any normal momma with three strapping men to call sons.
After my little Jolie gave me butterfly kisses last weekend, I decided to make a quilt with little butterflies fluttering around.  It was easy enough--although I do admit cutting out a decent butterfly without a drawing or pattern wasn't particularly easy.  I tried drawing a butterfly at first, but I'm not that kind of artist.  So I folded a piece of paper in half and cut out that might be a butterfly on another planet.  But I kept finagling it and trimming it till finally I had more pieces of paper on the floor than in my hands.  That's usually some sort of sign, so I started playing with the pieces that looked Martian and decided that if I turned the wings upside down, and made the head a little more round and maybe a little more proportional to the body, I might almost have something.


Surprise!  It is a butterfly!  And not half bad, at that.

In the end I had two goals--to make the quilt "modern" by using large blocks of fabrics, and to include a butterfly motif that I could change up if the mood struck me.  The mood always strikes when I'm very close to figuring something out.  So, instead of one or two large (as in huge) butterflies, I added several different colored butterflies and used three different butterfly patterns.


 Somehow I happened to have a decent little floral print with really nice butterfly pictures, so I started with that.  The piece was pretty small, although longish.  I added pinks, a yellow, a green, and a blue and glued the butterfly appliques on using fusible web.  Then I loaded the whole thing onto the long arm and played.  I barely started when I decide to quilting using a stipple and quilting in ghost butterflies along with some butterfly words.  I used the pattern from the appliques to draw the ghost butterflies with my quilting pencils, which washed out beautifully.

My plan was to sell "Butterfly Kisses" in my Etsy shop, but when my sister saw it, she decided to purchase it for her grand-daughter. Then I posted a photo on Facebook and a few more friends/family asked about it.  Apparently modern is in or lots of people like butterflies.