Butterflies in the heart of winter

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I went to an event called Papillons en fête at our local garden center. There you can walk into a greenhouse where exotic butterflies are flying freely all around you. It is such a nice experience to feel such warmth and see all the colors of the butterflies and the flowers, when outside it is still the heart of winter with cold and snow. This year I was even lucky enough to have two butterflies landing on my hands so that I could observe them closer. I took pictures and luckily some of them came out pretty nice.

Take a leap

Here it is, I have finally decided to take a leap into the bloggers world! I have been reading blogs, mostly craft blogs, for about two years and have found them to be an invaluable source of inspiration and new knowledge.

I would consider myself a crafty person, I have been interested in paper and fabric crafts since my early childhood, although I have never learned any technique properly. I just pick things as I go and give it a try, the way my mother has always done, going from quilting to oil painting to scrapbooking to anything new that would strike her fancy.

Lately I have got myself a sewing machine and have started experimenting with it, getting acquainted with its many possibilities. I am working on a country bag made of a patchwork of assorted check fabrics (from a pattern I found in an old issue of Handmade, vol.22, no.2)

I just seem to have a thing for checks these days (I am currently shopping for the perfect checkered sofa for our living room, too). When I told my mom about my plan for the bag and the fact that I did not have enough different check fabrics, she came up with a bag filled with scraps of exactly the kind of fabrics that I had in mind. Thanks mom!

To this point, I have sewed all sixteen squares separately and will now use a needle and thread to assemble them together by hand