Butterfly Garden Top

 My Butterfly Garden Quilt top is together! This is a design from Lori Holt's Quilty Fun book. I am teaching all the blocks as a BOM at my local fabric store. For April, we will be making the butterfly blocks, so I decided to make the butterfly block quilt featured in the book as an example for my class. It has 91 butterflies and 18 flowers.

 Here are some of the butterflies up close. I used navy Kona from my stash as the background. I had barely enough with a 2.5 inch strip leftover.

 I thought it would be easy to find a navy with a white dot for the borders as was shown in the book. Boy I was wrong, but I did find a small scale gingham that gives the same effect. Plus, I love gingham--I think it is perfect! The fabric that I used for the butterfly bodies was something I found in my mom's stash, but the local fabric store has more. I am thinking of picking that up for the backing. It is pretty good sized 59 x 70 inches. I think I am going to keep it and use it as a tablecloth for my dining room table--my Fiestaware will look perfect on it. I think I will quilt it on the longarm because of its size and I want to practice with a swirl design.

 Yesterday, I taught my class how to make the sewing baskets. This was my example--so simple and sweet.

 I am plugging away on my Down in the Garden block 1. I intend to make some more progress on it today for Slow Sunday Stitching
http://kathysquilts.blogspot.com/2016/03/slow-sunday-stitching-scissors.html

I am a huge Rachael Ray fan and subscribe to her magazine. I discovered a great economic and delicious recipe in her latest magazine--it is called a PBL (pineapple, bacon, lettuce) Sandwich. It has much more on it than just that--avocado, an egg, mayo, and I put pepper jack cheese too. My vegetarian daughter loved it minus the bacon and I also skipped cooking everything in bacon grease as the recipe called for. This was a big hit with everyone and will be a new go to at our house.

It is a sunny, spring-like day here. I hope to get out in the sunshine a little bit, but I also want to work on my Bloom blocks and get caught up with my Ugly Christmas Sweaters. So much to do and so little time--especially with losing an hour today!

Have a great week!