A Sky Full of Butterflies

This is my fourth fifth (wow!) round of the pillow talk swap. The pillow talk swap is hosted by Heather and this round was run by Kelly at Scrap Studio. For those who don’t know, the PTS is a blind swap where everyone makes a {super fabulous} pillow for a flickr friend somewhere in the world. This is my absolute favorite swap and I have received some seriously beautiful pillows. I feel like each round I have to raise the bar just to not disappoint my partner. And this time, my partner is seriously both the nicest person and super intimidating. She has some mad skillz, yo.

I have been dreaming of these butterflies since I saw this picture on Flickr. I’ve been a little obsessed with it. But, I also wanted my butterflies PERFECT. Not that wonky butterflies are bad, I just wanted mine to match up, you know? So I kept putting this project off. For this swap, I knew it was time to tackle this. I figured the quickest way to get all of my little points to match up was foundation paper piecing. So I drew up a pattern and went to work.

I came up with this

And I love it. It is made up of all of my most favorite fabrics. There is a little flea market fancy, a little texty goodness, some art gallery, a couple snippets of Violet Craft’s Madrona Road and my most favorite ever Annie’s Farm Stand seed catalog on black. I really really hope that my partner loves it as much as I do.

The points still don’t match up perfectly, but they are pretty close. I quilted it with a few diagonal lines and a plus in the middle. Then, I bound it with my machine. I haven’t done much machine binding. It shows 🙁 I don’t think I will bind much more by machine in the future, unless it is something that will be getting heavy use.

The back is my favorite stripe from Summer In The City and I hid a zipper in there. It was fun figuring out the zipper.

I hope it finds its way to a loving home. And I can’t wait to see what comes my way! There are so many fabulous pillows this time!

(click on the picture if you want to see closer views of the individual pillows)

Any of those could make their way to my living room and I would be thrilled. I guess it is time to start stalking the mailman! Monday cannot come fast enough!