This is my swap item for the Modern Quilters Ireland Summer swap. This year we are making baskets for each other based on the free pattern by @KelbySews called The One Hour basket. Full disclosure, this little basket took me quite a bit longer than 1 hour!
It’s funny the way things come together in your head or maybe the universe is practicing synchronicity but I was working on a talk for our guild on trends in online quilting and jotting down notes on how popular pieced animals are, some animals never seem to go out of style like deer and butterflies (I was thinking of the Tula Pink butterfly quilt in particular) when I stumbled on a paper pieced butterfly on Instagram called Take wing. So much happens on IG that I feel I blink and I miss things so I never deliberately look for blocks or patterns there, preferring instead Pinterest and google images. But this one caught my eye and clicking on the hashtag it took a bit to find the designer and the pattern and eventually I ended up here on Craftsy where I could purchase the mini version or the larger 24” one.
The one hour basket uses front and back pieces that are only 10 1/2” tall and this includes the bottom section too – reading through the pattern I found that the mini would still be too big so I reduced the print out and resized it to 6 1/2” tall by 10” wide and added background fabric to bring it up to the right size for the basket.
This little butterfly took all afternoon last Sunday to piece. I made 2 mistakes so he’s not quite symmetrical but I’m telling myself very little in nature is truly symmetrical anyway! This was a really good scrap buster and originally he was going to be blue and green and purple but the sun was shining so he ended up mostly red, orange, pink and yellow! There is a free pattern offered by the designer for smaller blocks if you want to make something smaller and quicker!
Having gotten the front panel made the rest of the bag went fast enough and I had a basket made in about 2 hrs! I’ve seen these used to hold fat quarters and WIP’s and I think they would make great scrap baskets too so can see myself making lots more of them!
So having made my basket and processed my photos, I set about writing this post so you could have the link to the basket and butterfly pattern if you wanted to make one. I stumbled into a war of words on copying between the butterfly designer and another quilter I much admire. I thought oh crap – hows that for timing? I’ll be posting links for everyone to click onto right into unpleasantness!
I thought about not writing this post, thought about ignoring the argument and then probably because I was watching Star Trek on Netflix, while making my basket, thought about how similar designs do pop up from time almost as if there is a collective consciousness like the Borg that we all tap into. In a previous post pondering where quilt ideas come from, I wrote about my triangle quilt and how I noticed when tidying up files on my computer, how similar it was in a much simplified way, to Anna Maria Horner's free pattern. I didn’t remember seeing AMH’s pattern but I must have because I had downloaded it to keep for later.
Around the same time Quilt Now gave away some hexagon templates perfect for 2 1/2” squares so mum and I settled in for the night watching TV and sorted the 375 swapped squares into colour families. The challenge deadline was January, I ordered beautiful green, white and pink woodland fabric by Dashwood Studios from LoveFabric.ie thinking I’d use the green or white as a background and scatter the flowers onto it. I made a mistake and didn’t order enough of either so I had to rethink my plan. I ended piecing the three colours to give the white fabric bordered by grass at the bottom and a pink sunset sky at the top. I had two really strong lines going across the quilt where the colours met so needed to camouflage them a bit.
I had bought this lovely grey from the Limerick Quilt shop to make a Jen Kingwell quilt with a box of Modern Solids but ended up using the grey in Flower power to hide the join lines. Then it made sense to echo that in the rest of the quilt! Stumbling on Craftypod's pattern they are so very similar, I wonder if I had seen it before but them again geometry is geometry, so who knows? The backgrounds are different, one is vertical the other horizontal, one uses 1 size flowers, the other 2 different sizes, one is a double bed quilt the other a lap quilt. Even so, I bought the pattern, partly curious as to how Diane made hers and partly because they are so similar maybe I did see this or something like this before and it stuck in my head, buried way down there with AMH’s triangles! Favouring the side of caution I paid the 9 dollars! We are all sponges and maybe somewhere down in the spongey part of my brain obsessed with quilts all these ideas bang into each other until one floats to the top!
Someone left a comment on the blog of one of the designers in the dispute that if you are going to release a pattern, you should check it’s not been done before. Sure the pattern instructions might be written differently and you can’t copyright a technique but if someone else got there first then fair enough! So I won’t be writing up Flower Power but if anyone wants information on how I made my quilt just drop me a line and I am happy to answer any questions or the link to Craftypods pattern is here if you want to download step by step instructions and templates.
Hope this didn’t ramble too much, second wordy post in row! Thanks for sticking with me – amazing what happens when all you want to do is make a butterfly!
