I am delighted to introduce Kathleen’s new WOOL APPLIQUE project today. Kathleen created beautiful traditional quilts for many years as well as working in a quilt shop for quite some time. Her passion is hand stitching and she is particularly fond of wool applique. This project is Kathleen’s version of Sue Spargo’s Butterfly Sampler. The sampler is part of Sue’s Craftsy class and a kit is available for purchase on Sue’s site. Kathleen chose a soft green wool for her background and in fact her palette reminds me of Easter colours. The entire sampler measures 16×22.
So, let us start with Butterfly #1 shown above.
The body of the butterfly is a pale brown wool embellished with a center row of chain stitch in a darker solid brown perle cotton. The butterfly wings are a pale grey wool. The upper wings are layered with a checkered grey cotton fabric and a turquoise wool. The outer wing is bordered with buttonhole stitch while the layering is bordered with Palestrina and further embellished with French knots using Kreinik size 8 braid. The bottom wings are bordered with backstitch laced with a perle cotton and the center is a tightly stitched beaded fly stitch.
If you are not familiar with fly stitch, you can find a video tutorial on Mary Corbet’s NeedleNThread HERE.
Over the coming weeks I will be sharing each of her butterflies with close-ups just in case you want to create a sampler of your own. She has used many of my Colour Complements threads throughout the project. I look forward to sharing more butterflies in coming weeks. Thank you Kathleen.
