Butterfly Houses

82" x 50"

"Butterfly Houses" is the 2nd Place award-winner in the 2002 "New Quilts from an Old Favorite: Tumbling Blocks" contest. More photos of this quilt and an essay about the inspiration and construction can be found in the book, New Quilts from an Old Favorite: Tumbling Blocks, published by the American Quilter's Society.

"Butterfly Houses" was inspired by the two fabrics in the borders. While digging through my fabric stash for another project, I noted that the architectural print and the butterfly print were laying on the work table together. I realized that the colors in the two fabrics were very similar. The idea for a metamorphosis from buildings to butterflies was born. I hoped to create a scene where butterfly houses were gradually transformed into butterflies.

The fabrics in the quilt are all cotton, and most of the pieces were cut with templates or a rotary cutter. The quilt is machine pieced, except for a small amount of hand appliqué where the butterflies fly into the border. The flowers in the garden are paper pieced. The inner border fabrics were chosen to balance the colors used in the interior of the quilt. I used the pieced sections of the border to merge from one border fabric to the other. It is machine quilted with Sulky 30 wt. rayon thread in many different solid and variegated colors.