April FNSI

Oh what a night.......as the song goes. I had a productive FNSI this month. I started right after "school" which means after I picked up my son and brought he and his friend to their club for their Friday night fun time. He's taking the club bus home now so that means it takes me 5 minutes to pick him up instead of 30. Bonus!
I'm doing the machine quilting on a friend's butterfly quilt. So that's what I finished last night.
With my trusty sidekick at my side


XL, double-double, stirred, not shaken.





I finished the stitching around each appliqued butterfly and then did a serpentine stitch in the narrow sashing. That's stitch # 19 at a stitch length of 4.0 and width of 5.0 on my Horizon. I can see myself using that again! I love how it made the sashing puff up.
This is why I LOVE my walking foot.

Serpentine stitch in the sashing.

Then I thought about what to do in the wide border. First I did a freehand butterfly in the corner. Well, let's just say: Madame Butterfly, meet Mr Frog. That butterfly was so NOT symmetrical and had a mishapen head to the point where one had to use a lot of imagination to decide that it was, indeed, a butterfly. So it came out.

That's when I decided 2 things.
1: I needed to use a paper template and
One seriously abused paper template.

2: I needed to stitch from the back so I could see what I was doing.
That was a good move, because it went a lot smoother from there. So now there was a full butterfly in each corner with a "in flight" butterfly around the perimeter. Between the "bugs" there is a swirly line to indicate the flight path. One of the butterflies is a true romantic, she flew in a heart shaped path. Another was a little tipsy and did many loops in a row before meeting the next one. :)
Butterfly in flight.

The outer border needed something a little plainer, so I just did loopies about the size of a quarter.
By midnight, I was done. In more ways than one.
Back of stitching around applique in blocks.

This morning I called my friend and told her it was done - she couldn't believe it. I put 14 hours into stitching it, all in about 4 days. So I think that was pretty good!
Pretty as a picture, don't you think?