Picking Fabric for the Butterfly Wings

A few weeks ago I designed a butterfly design for this blog as shown below.  It was a lot of fun and I was excited to applique it.

I started with a gorgeous solid blue background fabric.  Here's the process I went through in choosing the colors for the butterfly wings.

I started by picking out a bunch of fabrics I liked with my blue background fabric.

Now that I had a lot to choose from, I laid them underneath the blue fabric with just a 1/2 inch showing because all the pieces for this butterfly are very narrow.

I don't like the green with the blue.  And come to think of it, I don't want a green butterfly!

I like the oranges, but with just a thin strip showing, none of them stick out to me.

I really like the stripe on the right side here.  It has a lot of pattern for only 1/2 an inch showing!

Love the color, but it is a bit pale and I want my butterfly to shine.

I like all these crazy prints, but half an inch doesn't really do them justice.

The pinks are fun, but I don't like them much at this scale.

I really like these two prints.  They have a lot of character.

Next, I took my favorites and cut a thin piece of each.  Looking at these thin strips on the blue helped confirm my choice of the stripe in the center right for my butterfly.

My son and I have been reading The BFG by Roald Dahl.  It's one of my favorite children's books of all time.  In it, the BFG calls butterflies, "butteryflies," and so I think I will call this quilt the Butteryfly Quilt in honor of that memory.

Suzy