Butterfly quilt #4

Kinsey Claire's color is aqua. Here's the center of her butterfly quilt top that I made on a quilt retreat that I went on the first weekend in May, less than 2 weeks after she was born.  This quilt is not quite so monochromatic as her sisters' quilts. I fell in love with the floral fabric in the wings of the butterfly in the first block of the second row and decided to use it as my color scheme. I think I will use it as one of my borders.

Kinsey's Butterfly quilt

Yes, in the middle of all of the craziness of moving and remodeling our new house, I went on a 3 day quilt retreat!  Really, really bad timing but I signed up for the retreat way before our house sold and before I knew my daughter was pregnant.  To top it all off, Kinsey's grandpa on her father's side passed away that same weekend. On the bright side, I was able to work on Kinsey's quilt without interruption.  I still need to find border, backing and binding fabrics but that won't happen real soon as I don't even have any idea about how to set up my new sewing room yet.  I just ordered the flooring yesterday.  I do know that I need to part with alot so be watching for more give-aways.

We are officially in our new house as of today and it is total chaos. Boxes and messes are everywhere.  We decided to redo the kitchen and master bath before moving in but as of now, I have no kitchen countertop so no sink or dishwasher either.  None of the drawers have pulls, 2 wall cabinets are not installed, the roll-out shelves for the pantry are not in and none of the trim is done.  The master bath remains gutted but at least we have 2 other working showers.  The whole house is overflowing because we are downsizing by about 1000 sq. ft.  We love the layout of the new house and know all the mess will be worth it soon.

Here are some pictures of the progress of our new kitchen-

I'm linking to:

Give-away winners

Thanks to everyone that participated in the Paper Pieced Pattern-A-Day Garden Party Blog Hop.  I hope you all downloaded a bunch of the fantastic free patterns.  Thanks for all the nice comments and for entering my give-away.

The winners of my give-away of the Butterflies and Blooms book and the  Fast, Fun & Easy Scrapbook Quilts book have been notified by e-mail.  


Kathy won Butterflies and Blooms and Janet won Fast, Fun & Easy Scrapbook Quilts.


Stay tuned for more give-aways as I start packing to move.  I need to part with a few things!

Garden Party Blog Hop and Give-Away

Today is my day on the Garden Party Blog Hop hosted by Jennifer at Sewhooked.  I have designed a paper pieced Butterfly block.  Maybe my subconscious knew that my daughter was having a girl and made me design a butterfly pattern!  This one is different than those I showed you in the last post however.  I had planned on making this block into a mini quilt to show but just ran out of time with moving and a new grandbaby and all.  It's on my to-do list though and I will show it when it's done.

Garden Party Butterfly

You can download your FREE pdf copy of the block pattern here.  If you have never paper pieced before, Jennifer has a great tutorial here.

If you would like to try paper piecing with freezer paper, check out these two different techniques -here and here.


In addition to the FREE pattern, I am giving away two books-Butterflies and Blooms and Fast, Fun & Easy Scrapbook Quilts.  To enter, leave a comment letting me know which book you would like.  If you leave a no reply comment, I can't contact you so please leave an e-mail address if necessary. Two winners will be chosen at random on May 6th at 8:00 p.m. CDT.  I will email the winners and announce it on my blog.

Another butterfly quilt

Kinsey Claire was born yesterday.  She is my fourth granddaughter and my daughter's fifth child.  We women now outnumber the men by one!  Before Kinsey was born, I had three grandsons and three granddaughters.

Kinsey and Grandma

We didn't know the sex of the baby before Kinsey was born so I didn't start a quilt for her.  Now that she's here, I know I need to make another butterfly quilt because I've made one for each of her three older sisters.

Macy's quilt

Lainey's quilt

Lylie's quilt

The pattern is from a Buggy Barn book entitled "Celebrated Craziness" and the pattern is called Butterflies. As you can tell, I've assigned each girl her own color.  I wonder what color Kinsey will be?  I better check with her Momma!

Garden Party Blog Hop and update

Not much quilting going on at my house these days.  (update at the bottom of the post) The only sewing I've been doing is for the Paper Pieced Pattern-A-Day Garden Party Blog Hop.

For the whole month of April, Jennifer at Sewhooked has been featuring a different pattern designer every day on her blog. Each designer has designed a paper pieced pattern and will post it for free on their assigned day.  The only guidelines were the theme "Garden Party" and the size, 10" finished blocks.  There are some great patterns posted so far.  My day is April 29th so check back to see my interpretation of the theme and get your free pattern.

Jennifer is also giving away a prize every week and several of the designers are having giveaways along with their free patterns. So,click here to go to the Garden Party Blog Hop and pick up some free patterns.  If you have never paper pieced before,there are alot of great tutorials posted on the web. There are a few newer methods since I learned to paper piece too.  If you tried paper piecing before and didn't like it, try a different method.

On a different note, we found a house!!  It's only 2 blocks from where we live right now which is also two blocks closer to my quilting buddy Linda of L&R Designs Quilting. So, at some point, there will be lots of quilting going on.  We take possession of our new home on April 27th but don't have to be out of our current home until May 15th so we have time to do alot of updating.  I have been planning a new kitchen and bathrooms as well as picking out appliances, flooring, paint colors, etc.  I plan to show before and after pictures of the remodel as we go along so this blog may be more about decorating than quilting for awhile as I am an Interior Designer when I'm not quilting.

And my daughter is due to have baby #5 on April 26th!! Lots of stuff going on besides quilting.