Design
Concept
The design for this quilt began with a photograph I took an a visit to a butterfly garden in Victoria BC in 2015. I loved the graphic quality of the butterfly in black, white, and red against the verdant background of vegetation.
Most of the fabrics are from my Gradations collection for Benartex. The background fabric on the right was hand painted. Additional shading in the wings and flower petals was added with pencil, marker, and paint sticks.
The very dense quilting was done with many different colors of #40 top-stitching thread. In the flower and the wings, the quilting added more shading. In the large leaves, I added some fantasy spirals and vein lines with several different colors of green thread. The painted background fabric was quilted with random leaf shapes in light chartreuse and the spaces between the leaves were quilted with three values of turquoise in a dense meander pattern to make the leaves stand out.
For the binding I chose a commercial, zebra striped fabric in black and white to echo the black and white of the butterfly wings. |
