I have posted pictures of this quilt as I was making progress on my flickr page, but have never written about it.So here we go…

Recently I have been… I am reluctant to say this… yes… “a bit” hooked on thrifting… vintage sheets to be more precise. A few weeks ago I found a flat sheet and a pillowcase with this beautiful butterflies, designed by Hanae Mori. I was distracted by other projects for a while, but then I just grabbed the sheet and started cutting the butterflies (unfortunately, it’s a border print, so there is only about 20 butterflies there; the good thing is that the rest of the sheet was more than enough for all the sashing – it was actually refreshing to work with fabric and not have to calculate every piece, not having to worry about miscutting, being able to rip strips…):

First I cut all squares, but then I thought some squares, some rectangles might be more fun. Then I selected 3 colors (apart form brown which appears in every butterfly) for the inner frame – yellow, blue and orange. That was not so easy as I don’t have a big stash of solids. Actually, only the blue is from a solid fabric. Red and brown (the outer frame) come from a striped fabric which looks a bit like shot cotton. And the yellow comes from another striped fabric. It took a while to cut enough stripes (luckily, the all the stripes were exactly the width I needed – 3/4 in).

After the inner frame was done, I added the background fabric around, to make a 12 in square. The size is completely random. I started with the biggest butterfly, added the “background” and cut to what looked good, which was 12×12 in. Not very scientific. I did the same with all other butterflies, placing only 3 (framed in orange) in the middle of the big square (that is approximately in the middle). Just to calm the movement a bit. I like randomness in design, but some regularity, some symmetry is always good.

Finally, when the squares were finished, and the sashing was about to be added, I felt – hmmm, that I needed something else, something… So I created these tiny squares (from the 3 inner frame colors) and made them the center of sashing in between squares in each row:

and since I had some left (the strips with tiny squares), I also put them on the border, in each corner. Hope this explanation makes sense.

I don’t have a picture of the fabric I used for the back – but it’s another vintage sheet with stripes in almost the same colors as on the front (except for the blue). I really lucked out on this one. I used the same sheet to make a bias tape for binding:

I usually don’t cut binding on the bias for quilts – there are no curves, and I really don;t want it to stretch too much. I find that binding not cut on bias gives quilt edges more firmness. But this time, just because of the stripes design on the sheet, I wanted them “slanted” on the binding.

And now the quilting….