Making a Summer Quilt + TOG Ratings

A summer quilt is usually a very light coverlet of a quilt. It consists of a front and a back and may have an inner layer of a cotton or cotton flannel sheet or very, very thin, flat batting - think of the old-fashioned no loft, very airy batting that almost looks like it could pull apart--cotton candy like! 

It is used quilted or tied,  primarily single layer of bedding in hot climates and almost always in the summer, hence the name "summer quilt"!

Summer Day

Quilting Poems, Sayings, and Superstitions

TOG Ratings Chart

What is a TOG and what are its ratings?

TOG stands for Thermal Overall Grade and is a unit of measurement for insulation and warmth of sleepwear and bedding. 

Put simply, the lower the TOG rating the lighter the fabric. The higher the rating, the more padded and insulated it is for warmth.

Summer (hot): 3 or 4.5 Tog rating

Summer (cooler): 6 or 7.5

Spring/Fall: 9 or 10.5

Winter (Cool): 12 or 13.5

Winter (Freezing): 15 or 16.5

There you go the easy and the scientific explanation of a summer quilt!

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

The Summer Day

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. 

Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

American Poet

(1935-2019)

I need a shadier hat!

Ahhh, that's better!

Ah, the blue one is really relaxing me!

Is it's too hot for cameras, it's way too hot for cats. 

It's cool cat time!

What about us???

The protest begins!

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

Thoughts on The Butterfly + Butterfly Quilts

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your

grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~Rabindranath Tagore

Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have

sunshine, freedom and a little flower.”

~Hans Christian Anderson

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

~Carl Sagan

This great purple butterfly,

In the prison of my hands,

Has a learning in his eye

Not a poor fool understands.

~William Butler Yeats, “Another Song of a Fool”

Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and

fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

~Elizabeth Goudge

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,

(His honest idiocy of flight)

Will never now, it is too late,

Master the art of flying straight.

~Robert Graves, “Flying Crooked”

Know thyself!  A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly.  Whoever observes

himself arrests his own development.  A caterpillar who wanted to know

itself well would never become a butterfly.

~Andre Gide

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,

Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly

That flieth unto judgment without screen?

~Dante Alighieri

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.

The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

~Rabindranath Tagore

 Stray Birds

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes

it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

~Maya Angelou

The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the

other side of the planet.

~Paul Erlich

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks

As if all summer settled there and died.

~Philip Larkin, “Autumn”

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today I saw one.  

It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going

to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake – as

almost all hats are.

~Nikolaus Laszlo, Nora Ephron, and Delia Ephron

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.

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

Another Easy Butterfly: quick and easy butterfly block.

Batik Butterflies with a hint of an Amish look.

Butterfly Quilt Block Pattern: jiffy instructions from McCalls.

Jewel Butterfly Quilt Pattern :one applique shape, embellished with embroidery

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

Butterfly Garden

Scrappy (shown above) Butterflies Quilt for Baby Crib 

 

Other Ideas:

Unusable variation ideas:

Applique Butterfly

Butterflies, Wonky Free Piecing 

Tutorial by Lynne of the Patcherie Menagerie

Butterfly BlockTutorial by Mrs. Schmenkman Quilts

Charming Butterfly Blocks by Ferne

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

https://cdn.hswstatic.com/pdf/johnny-jump-ups-quilt-block.pdf

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

http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/fluttering-by-butterfly-quilt-block.htm

Quilt Blocks Image Gallery

See more pictures of quilt blocks.

©2007 Publications International, Ltd. The Fluttering Butterfly 

From Michele Bilyeu Creates With Heart and Hands:

Complete List by Themes:

https://www.with-heart-and-hands.com/p/my-own-free-patterns-tutorials-and.html?m=0

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

Please excuse my psycho typos.

I blog on a Galaxy Note 9 mobile phone using only mobile data. signal in a no wifi available home.

 Not easy but I am a determined woman who doesn't give up easily 🤣

Sleeping in the Forest

"I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. 

I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. 

All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. 

All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better."

"Sleeping In The Forest"

Mary Oliver

Poet extraordinaire

Snippets and Thread Tales 

With Heart and Hands from Michele:

And so we all return to life as we know it. We take deep breaths to center and ground ourself to the earth, we walk among the green things, under a canopy of trees.

We bid a final goodbye to someone we loved, now gone, and return our focus to the living, our families, and all that we yet need to do in this world before we too depart to sleeping in our own forests of our own beliefs, our own making.

I hold my young and very young grandchildren close, I read to them, make puzzles, draw and color, we play with toys their parents once played with.

I've learned to merge the past, present, and prepare them for the future. Just as all their parents do.

We have lots and lots of love and joy among life's challenges and sadnesses.

I look for and still can find peace.

And for that I am so truly grateful.  

Michele Bilyeu Creates *With Heart and Hands

Making Peace any Prayer Flags

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

Metamorphosis

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or

whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

~Chuang Tzu

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes

it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

~Maya Angelou

"Consider what happens to a bottle of water when it is left in the freezer. As it cools down, there is a steady, continuous change in its temperature.


The water won’t change much

in appearance until it begins to get near the critical threshold of its freezing point. Then, as it passes this, an extraordinary process happens.


Tiny crystals form, and when they do, other crystals form around those crystals, until there is a mass movement of crystallization in the water that rapidly changes state from liquid to solid.


This is discontinuous change.
With discontinuous change, a threshold is crossed where rather than just more of the same happening, something different occurs. There’s a jump to a new level, an opening to a new set of possibilities.


We might think it impossible that a small amount of water could crack something as hard as glass, but as the ice expands, it breaks the bottle."


Joanna Macy

“All life on Earth was created by tiny changes in molecules. An inestimable number of changes. Our bodies are miracles of transformation.”

"To find a fossil in a galaxy of rocks, you have to see in a different way. It’s called having a search image, a biological term. A search image is simply a picture an animal has in its mind as it looks for food or habitat. 

When an animal finds something that helps it survive, it fixes the visual characteristics of that thing in its mind. 

If it finds it again, the sharpness of the image improves, as does the animal’s chance of survival. Humans got where they are today with the help of search images, and we still use them every day.

 It’s how we quickly find our favorite cereal in a vast landscape of boxes.

Discontinuous change and phase shifts are the things of cocoons—metamorphosis. Most of us are familiar with the general concept of how a caterpillar will form a chrysalis then emerge weeks later transfigured into a butterfly. 

Less well known is how the caterpillar resists change. As it dissolves in its own digestive acids, the immune system of the cocooned pupa will attack the imaginal cells that are trying to transform it. In turn, a nascent imago will fall again and again into the soup of its former self. But this seemingly counterproductive immune response serves to strengthen the imaginal cells so that they can finally give rise to a winged, visually stunning creature.

Daniel Pinchbeck

How Soon is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation

"I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way to even a greater being of soul, a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play with Him."

Hafiz 

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies

as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.  

We adults,

on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to

stoop down to them.  It seems to me that the grass hates us when we

confess our love for it.  Whoever would partake of all good things must

understand how to be small at times.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Grown-ups love figures.  When you tell them that you have made a new

friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters.  They

never say to you, “What does his voice sound like?  What games does he

love best?  Does he collect butterflies?”

 Instead, they demand:  “How

old is he?  How many brothers has he?  How much does he weigh?  How much

money does his father make?”  Only from these figures do they think they

have learned anything about him.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 

From "The Little

Prince"

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How

else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the

moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.

That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the

changes of his mind on the hop.

~Vita Sackville-West

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave.

The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

~Rabindranath Tagore

"Stray Birds"

I blog on a Galaxy Note 9 mobile phone using only mobile data signal in a no wifi home.  Not easy but I am a determined woman who doesn't give up easily!

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