Fluttering Butterfly

This is the 3rd and final piece for the same family who ordered the pieces featured on the Family Fun and on Flowering Tree posts.  I have received very positive feedback from the family on all 3 pieces, which always does my heart good.

This piece was for the youngest daughter in the family and it was surprisingly difficult because I didn’t want it to look too much like her mom’s.  I wanted it to be unique, just for her.  I can’t tell you how many flowers got scrapped in the process.  And drawings of layouts.  Finally, however, I did decide to go with something similar, but using different flowers.  Of course, there is only one butterfly (representing the little girl) instead of a whole family of winged creatures so I was able to slightly dramatize the butterfly fluttering delightfully among the flowers with just a few dots of a fine-tipped Sharpie.  What fun!  🙂

Something kind of fun about the pieces for the 2 daughters is that they will be displayed next to each other on a wall.  So I was careful to use the same color for the background and the same font and color for the text.  I also wanted the colors of the quilled elements to go well together.  I started out using all the colors in this piece that I used in the “flowering tree” piece.  Yikes.  That did NOT work.  The red, orange, and gold colors looked hideous and those were the flowers that got scrapped (as did at least one of the shades of blue I tried0.  Once I paired down the colors to pink, purple, yellow, and blue–with some white in there too–it came together very quickly and, I think, nicely.

I’ll share some photos of the piece on it’s own and also one next to the flowering tree since they’ll be wall buddies.

Flowering Tree

I hadn’t quilled trees in a long time before this project and had missed them very much.  That’s why there are a zillion photos with this post.  Enthusiasm.

This order was for the same family who ordered the “Family Fun” piece.  That piece was for the mother and this piece if for her oldest daughter.  The request was for a tree and a butterfly (to represent the daughter).  The tree, it was suggested, could be inspired from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.  And it was… kind of.  All the same, I was very pleased with how it turned out.  It has a very simple look to it, and I really like the color added by the blossoms.  There is quite a bit more open space (I can’t remember what the “artistic” term for that is) than usual, which was intentional.

The trunk is basically a bunch of marquee rolls all squished together.  I line the sides of the trunk with a single strip of paper just to smooth out the appearance.  The leaves are also marquee rolls, I think they were mostly 4″ strips, 1/8″ wide.  I used 3 shades of green for the leaves and 2 shades of brown for the trunk.  The blossoms were mostly 1″ tight coils.  Honestly, this is a piece a beginner could make… the shapes are very basic and the creative options (i.e., the shape of the tree, how to place leaves, blossoms, bluebirds, etc.) are endless.  This was a very fun piece to quill and I look forward to doing more trees in the future.

The photos show the piece from just about every angle.  I blurred out some of the birthday for the sake of privacy.