Butterfly Quilts

Butterfly Quilt Pattern ~ How many ways can you make a butterfly quilt? This post has ideas for several. You can use vintage hankies, embroidery, or make an applique or pieced block.

The Butterfly quilt is widely known and has been around a long time. The Kansas City Star published their version of it in 1936. Since then there have been many variations of it, all beautiful. Below is a link to that very pattern on the McCall’s Quilting website.

Free Butterfly Quilt Patterns

On the McCall’s Quilting website you’ll find several free butterfly quilt patterns you can download.

One Friday Freebie is a Vintage Pieced Butterfly Quilt Pattern published in a 1936 issue of the Kansas City Star newspaper. The PDF pattern is four pages and worth checking out.

Folded Hankie Butterfly Quilt

Here’s a tutorial for making a Vintage Hankie Butterfly Block. By folding the hankies in a different way, the butterfly either looks like it has just landed on a flower or is in flight.

The colors and designs of the vintage hankies gives each butterfly their own personality. Do a search on “Origami Butterfly” and you’ll find tons of tutorials and step-by-steps on how to fold your hankie. Some are complicated but a few are easy to follow.

Also this eHow website has a pretty straight forward set of instructions for How to Make Butterflies From Hankies for a Quilt.

However you decide to fold your hankie, once it’s been folded and ironed, use a hand applique stitch to sew it to the background you’ve chosen. Blind stitch the folds so they won’t come undone.

Quilt or Pillow

We’ve been talking a lot about making your hankie butterfly blocks into a quilt, but there’s no reason you couldn’t make your applique block into a pillow to use in decorating a pretty shabby chic bedroom or couch.

No Folding Hankie Quilt

Also if you don’t want to fold your hankies, just use the full handkerchief to make the blocks for your quilt. At The Quilt Index website there are several examples of vintage hankie quilts that have been cataloged for museums and universities.

To enlarge the photos on The Quilt Index site, click on the picture. When you click on it again you’ll be taken back to the index page. Be sure to go to the second page, you’ll find a << 1 2>> at the bottom. On that second page of quilts you’ll find a Friendship Hankie Quilt from 1885. It’s beautiful.

Embroidery for a Butterfly Quilt

There are so many ways you can make your quilt unique. Embroidery is a great addition to a butterfly quilt. This illustration shows you several different ways you can embroider a butterfly once it’s been appliqued onto a quilt.

To save this sheet of butterfly embroidery designs, follow the download instructions for the quilt pattern.

Each of the embroidery designs above use the body from the butterfly quilt pattern pictured below.

Download Instructions: Right-Click on the image. Select either “save link as” or “save image as” depending on what browser you are using. Or simply click on it, it will open in a new window and save or print it from there.

Here’s a close up of the body template:

Butterfly Quilting Design

Here’s a really pretty butterfly quilting design you can print out from an earlier blog post. You can find it here, A Butterfly, A New Beginning, A New Year.

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Enjoy!

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