About Me

    Hello! Welcome to my small corner in the vast quilting world!  I am a wife, mother, and quilter. 

      I made my first quilt after the birth of my first son in 1997.  I bought the Singer's Quilting Bible, a quilting mat/ruler/rotary cutter set, and a small amount of green and off-white fabric.  I grew up knowing the basics of sewing and was always amazed by the skill of my aunt who was an accomplished seamstress. So much so, that she was the one who made my wedding dress. However, I found the quilting process much more fascinating from start to finish. 

    I immediately planned the next quilt, bought the fabric and cut it all out. A few other projects joined it in the fabric bins for years as our family expanded.  Life was consumed with home decoration projects from our multiple moves.  Pillow covers, window treatments, nursery bedding, and duvet covers and shams. I always sighed when I saw my zip-lock bags filled with those cut triangles and rectangles.

    In 2004, I was asked to finish a quilt someone started for my boys' school auction. I was hooked again and spent every year making one to two quilts a year for the school auction. I sometimes wanted to quit because I would struggle to push twin to queen size quilts on my domestic machine. 

    My mother was visiting and remarked that I didn't have a lot of quilts around for someone who called herself a quilter.   In November 2010, I pieced the very second quilt for our family to keep and I never looked back again.

Quilting changed me. 

 It also was the one thing that got me through the loss of my daughter, Jamie Lynn, in the fall of 2009.  Quilting is a therapy of sorts for me.  My studio is also the one place I feel like my daughter is closest to me.

Enough that my darling husband looked into my soul.  He actually accompanied me to the Houston Quilt Show in November 2011 and we came home with my Handiquilter Avante 18in Longarm Quilting Machine, affectionately called Ole Betsy.

 

Our family moved to the foothill mountains of Salt Lake City in the summer of 2015, and you can find me, most days amazed by my surroundings and utterly content to have all of my machines and fabric surround me in my home studio. 

You can also find a few tutorials and patterns on this website that I have designed.  I also do commissioned quilts and work with companies to promote tools, patterns, and fabrics if they are something I would buy myself. 

Besides quilting, I still read books on occasion, crosstitch rarely, run like the devil is chasing me, cook if someone requests something specific, and I'm ALWAYS game for someone to call me away to watch a really good movie with them.  Especially if I have a some handwork I can settle in with.

Feel free to email me at boysbuttonsandbutterflies@gmail.com if you have any great leads on some new fabric, tools, or just have questions.  I'm rarely too slow to respond, but feel free to nudge me.
Sometimes I get distracted by the children that live in my house.
Apparently, I'm supposed to tend them?

  

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When I first started this blog, I posted many of my thoughts about my daughter here, but I have since moved them to my other blog
  Butterfly Kisses.  

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