Butterflies III

This is the lucky 13th baby quilt I have made for my friend Mari, and the third time I have used butterflies as the theme. See Butterflies and Butterflies For Hannah for the others.

 

For this quilt, I started with a panel which had 2 butterflies that were surrounded by the flower pattern seen on the border. The panel itself (24" x 44") didn't work for the design I had in mind, so I bought two of them and fussy-cut the butterflies to 12" x 12". Then I flipped the butterflies on the right side so that they were symmetrical.  

 

The green and white mini-butterfly border fabrics are the same ones I used in a previous quilt for Mari, Dominique's Garden.

 

What to do for the quilting?  The butterflies are already so colorful that I didn't want to detract from them. I thought about using variegated thread, but just couldn't find a way to make it work. Then I noticed the thin white border surrounding each butterfly and their distinctive wing patterns.  Yes!!! So I used white thread to free-motion outline each of these. Invisible and gives dimensionality to the butterflies.  I then did use rainbow variegated thread to ditch around the 4 central squares and then in each border ditch.

 

The final touch was the label for baby Sofia, new sister to Jaxson .