Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands*

Monday, August 03, 2020

Butterfly Quilts and Out of this World Constellations

Thousands of light years away, there's a "space butterfly" colored with brilliant blues and clouds of purple and red. It's an image we've never seen in this much detail before.

So named for its resemblance to the winged insect, the "butterfly" is actually a planetary nebula -- a giant cloud of gas that forms around an ancient star that hasn't yet exploded.

The European Space Observatory's (ESO) aptly named Very Large Telescope, stationed in host country Chile, recently captured a vibrant image of the interstellar object.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/02/world/space-butterfly-nebula-scn-trnd/index.html

And check out the very "other worldy"Chilean observatory with its rather lunar living look about it!

Very Large Telescope | ESO United States:

https://www.eso.org/public/usa/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/

Ah yes, the very of this world textile artsy of many quilt makers "Butterfly Quilts Ideas and Inspiration".

Now wouldn't it be great fun to make a very artsy quilt based on NGC899?
We just might need to create a more inventive name for it than NGC889!

This is my only Butterfly art quilt made many moons (or perhaps even light years away) for donation to Alzheimer's research funding through the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative.

"Butterfly Quilts Ideas and Inspiration"

Butterfly quilts are still much sought after and beautifully popular. As symbols of re-birth and metamorphosis, we are drawn to their symbolic imagery of awakening to a new life, new opportunities and the chance to be 'born again' into all that we wish and dream we might become.

I have been collecting free butterfly quilt patterns for some time, and was motivated by the beautiful butterfly quilts at the 2008 Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show in Sisters, Oregon to combine those quilt photographs with my free butterfly quilt patterns .

Butterfly Garden

Butterfly Quilt:

filled with colorful butterflies & easy to follow pattern by Janel Lyles.
Download Instructions

Click here to download a .pdf.

B is for Butterfly:

Click here for templates A

Click here for templates B

Click here for templates C

Colorful Butterfly:

easy butterfly block

Batik Butterflies with a hint of an Amish look.

Fluttering Butterfly:
quilt block that is great for the beginner.

Applique Butterfly

Butterflies, Wonky Free Piecing Tutorial by Lynne of the Patcherie Menagerie

Butterfly BlockTutorial

by Mrs. Schmenkman Quilts

Charming Butterfly Blocks

Zen Garden Butterfly: free butterfly quilt pattern courtesy of Jane Sassaman

Sometimes "patterns" ate simply drawings like the one above. Enlarge, print.

http://www.freeapplique.com/applique.data/shapes/butterflypattern3.jpg

Quilt Blocks

Gallery

See more pictures of quilt blocks.
©2007 Publications International

Butterfly Quilt by Alex Anderson for the Always & Forever collection at P&B Textiles. Alex Anderson link no longer comnects but you can still be inspired or create something similar!

Hope you enjoyed these! Now to create and share of your own.

(Send photos of your creations and I'll add them in if you provide info.)

Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands as she shares her imaginative, magical, and healing journey from Alaska to Oregon. Creating, designing, sewing, quilting, and wildcrafting... from my heart and with my hands.

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Reaching Out with Light and Joy

There is only a single, urgent task: to attach oneself someplace to nature, to that which is strong, striving and bright with unreserved readiness, and then to move forward in one’s efforts without any calculation or guile, even when engaged in the most trivial and mundane activities.

Each time we thus reach out with joy, each time we cast our view toward distances that have not yet been touched, we transform not only the present moment and the one following but alter the past within us, weave it into the pattern of our existence, and dissolve the foreign body whose exact composition we ultimately do not know.”

Rainer Marie Rilke
Letters on Life page 7

Our sunflowers come up year after year. Thriving and reseeding with very limited attention or care. They give me great hope in perseverance, hope, and survival in spite of all challenges. I choose hope, joy and finding beauty all around me.

With a deep faith and sustaining belief that all sentient beings are connected to, and with nature, I feel all of us interconnected. If sunflowers can grow with such abundance and exhuberance of spirit then so can we all.

We have survived losses that hurt us to the core of our being. We have all faced fear and anxiety and managed to keep going anyway. We have all been so exhausted, so tired of fighting through sickness or disease or pain.

We are still here. We are still fighting. Deep inside we know we are here for a reason. We keep waiting to figure out what our life purpose is. All the while we are already doing it, already learning bit by bit, day by day.

We are all hanging in there. Trying our best.

I'm at week 6 of my "Great Attic/Garage Clean out of 2020". Oh the stuff that I saved ! I boggle my own mind. But what an adventure reliving my youth, high school and college adventures! Getting married, having children, all the birthdays and Christmases and fun of making, buying, and always the giving!

I am filled with gratitude to still be here. To still have so much joy and love.