Lepidopteran #4

The design for this quilt began with a photograph I took at a butterfly garden in Victoria, British Columbia. I loved the graphic quality of the butterfly in black, white, and red against the verdant background of vegetation. Most of the fabrics are from my Gradations collection for Benartex. The background fabric was hand painted with dye. Additional shading was added with pencil, marker, and paint sticks. The quilting added even more shading to the flower and the wings. The painted background fabric was quilted with random leaf shapes in light chartreuse, and the spaces between the leaves were quilted with three values of turquoise in a dense meander pattern to make the leaves stand out.