Hello! Welcome to my small corner in the vast quilting world! I am a wife, mother, quilter, and jokingly say I am a school nurse in my spare time!
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 when I was caught in carpool line handstitching something. 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 I became quite prolific. I had a few tutorials and patterns online. I also do commissioned quilts and work with companies to promote tools, patterns, and fabrics if they are something I would buy myself. In 2018, my quilt life got flipped upside down when we moved back to Texas to Austin. My husband started his own business while we had two children going to college...quilting doesn't really cover healthcare. I returned to the nursing workforce as a school nurse again.
Now you find me mostly quilting and planning on school breaks and holidays. 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. As time goes on, I am learning to balance it all and share my work again.
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 am slower to respond these days when I spend all day on my work emails, so feel free to nudge me. And 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 blogButterfly Kisses.
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