Continuous butterflies

I'm so far behind, it's a  bit hard to know where to start. So I'm starting with the easiest thing, which is the quilting I've been doing this evening. I offered to quilt my friend Joy's lovely quilt for her daughter, and have been busy with it this week. I've used a lovely pink champagne coloured Bottom Line thread top and bottom throughout. It blends nicely with the beautiful colour-scheme of white, cream, chocolate and soft reds of the pieced blocks, and shows up just enough for the butterflies on the solid cream.

The blocks in the centre were given an all-over treatment of open feathers, but Joy had mentioned she'd like some butterflies if possible, so the plain inner border has butterflies. I recalled this concept of swirling into and out of the butterfly from a pantograph I saw once, and adapted it for my purpose. Then I marked it on a piece of cardboard and cut out sections as needed, so I could transfer enough of a guideline to the fabric with an air-erasable marker.

The marks left me with a continuous design around the border, and I fudged the spacing a little so that each corner is the same.

Although I didn't mark the actual loops between butterflies (too fiddly to bother cutting the template!) I did mark the lines into and out of them. The extra cut-out was just an easy way to make space to cut the actual lines I wanted.