Seventh finish — Pieridae

I made this quilt as a house warming gift for a friend at work. His house, the one he & his wife built in the 1980s was severely damaged by flooding after Hurricane Harvey. He has been a widower for about 10 years & is getting on in age. He was faced with the prospect of repairing the house or starting anew, he finally made the difficult decision to leave the old house & get an undamaged one. He has been in the new house for a few months now, but is only now nearly done with sifting through 30 years of life in a house. It has been a hard & draining process for him, so I wanted to make him something special.
At work, his area is the entomology collection & his special love is butterflies & moths. So I wanted to make him a butterfly quilt -- but a butterfly quilt that isn't girly. Keeping the colors simple seemed keep it masculine, yellow & blue seemed a good choice. There are sweet little yellow butterflies called Sulphurs that I thought would be perfect. I tried drafting a Sulphur-shaped block but it looked kind of clunky, so I decided to use Elizabeth Hartman's Ghost Moth pattern.

This was a 2017 finish.

Sixth finish — Flower Fields

A few years ago, I went with Shug to San Antonio. There was a gathering of wood-turners (yes, turners have 'guilds', retreats & big gatherings just like quilters) that he wanted to attend. Neither of us had ever been to San Antonio& the meeting was to be on the River Walk -- so, Yeah!, let's go!

Not to be sexist, but most wood-turners are men, and most of their spouses are women. In advance of the meeting, there was a call to see if any of the spouses would be interested in a quilting lounge or maybe a shop hop. The shop hop sounded fun, I had never been on one, so one day of the wood-turners' meeting, a bunch of us piled into a bus & hit the road. We went to 4 shops in the greater San Antonio area. Of course, I needed nothing, but I ended up with a lot of floral fat quarters -- they were speaking to me that day & I could see them all together in something very cheery.  A couple of years ago, I began seeing this cute quilt & knew I found a perfect setting for my florals. But, my go-with was a roll of ombre solids, so I could not exactly follow the pattern. I modified it to use 2.5 inch strips & quickly sewed up this very cheery quilt.