Finish: Geometric Butterfly for Sewtopia Swap

One of my personal goals for 2015 was to attend a sewing retreat. To that end, I've signed up to attend Sewtopia in Chicago next month (April). There's more info on Sewtopia below. 

Now that we are less than a month out, I'm starting to work on a few projects for the retreat. First on my list was to create something (anything - there were no restrictions!) for a swap.

Just when I was starting to seriously think about what I wanted to make for the swap, I received an email from Kristy at Quiet Play asking if I would be interested in testing a new paper-pieced pattern for her. I jumped at the chance and decided to kill two birds with one stone: I pieced her new "Geometric Butterfly" block and then finished it off into a 12.5" mini quilt for my swap item.  (Earlier I had a chance to test a penguin block for Kristy. You can see my finished guy here.)

For this project, everything that I used came from my scrap bins, except for the black and white stripe fabric.  I had a lot of fun digging through my pink, red and orange scrap bins.  Since the block is so bright and busy, and the background is full of words (Allison Glass Sun Print Text), I opted to keep the quilting simple and just stitched in the ditch around the red wings, and then did 1 "echo" line around each wing in white (hard to see, but it's there in the above photo - and is clearer in the photo below).

I bound the quilt in a skinny black and white stripe from Timeless Treasures, and added a few hanging pockets on the back. (Click here for a tutorial on the hanging pockets from Lori Holt.)

For fun, I added one of my labels from my fabric gift bags and called it done! 

Molehill Quilt - photo courtesy of Latifah Saafir

Two other projects for Sewtopia, involved picking fabrics for the two classes that I will be taking with Latifah Saafir from Latifah Saafir Studios and Rita Hodge from Red Pepper Quilts. 

Latifah is teaching us to make her molehill quilt (curved piecing - upper left). Above (right) are the fabrics that I've picked out.

Rita is going to work with us on making a Kansas Dugout mini-quilt. I had fun using Electronic Quilt (design program below) to try out different color and fabric schemes for this one.

Last up on my Sewtopia To Do list is to finish a challenge project using designated fabrics from Michael Miller. More on that one to come...