Butterflies, Moths, Dragonflies, and A Katydid, (I Think)

I pulled the stitches from the fabric coasters, with my seam ripper, and cut off the hemmed fabric. Fran sent the insects to me over the winter.

I kept  them in a basket with some other special pieces of fabric.  I kept them in the back of my mind, waiting.

Yesterday I decided to use them, I could see them flying around in the center of a quilt.  Laying in bed,  I tried out different background colors in my mind.  Picturing the insects on off-whites, blacks and blues.  I pictured patterns of fabric I knew I had.

Sometimes that works, but this time it didn’t.  Nothing I imaged was quite right.

So this morning I went to my studio and started looking for the right fabric.  The ziplock bag was in a box of fabric someone sent me that still needed to be washed.  It mush have slipped off the shelf and fallen in there.  As I pulled out the pieced-together squares, I could immediately see the insects surrounded by them.

Hannah sent me the squares.  A friend gave them to her and she said she’d been “hanging onto them too long.”  “So many hours of precision work here!” Hannah wrote, “They need to be part of something.”

The colors were just right.  And I knew when the stripes were sewn together,  they would create the movement I was looking for.  I laid the squares out on my floor and place the insects next to them, matching colors.

Then I chose one square for each insect, cut it to the right size and stitched them together.  Then I just kept sewing…

I worked my monthly shift at the Cambridge Co-op this afternoon, but after dinner I came back to my studio and worked till I had all the insects sewn into the rectangle.

I’m too tired to keep working on it tonight, but I do love having a piece  like this waiting in my studio for me to work on in the morning.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to wake up early and go to bed late.