There is some great free stuff out there on the internet and one paper piecing  pattern that seems to crop up all over the place are the butterfly patterns of Lilleyella.  And why not, they are very effective and reasonably easy to make. Cath of Wombat Quilts has done a whole swarm of butterflies using liberty fabrics and they are stunning.  So never one to ignore a creative trend I ran off the pattern and set to. They only use scraps and I have plenty of those.  In fact whilst, as always, I agonised over the fabric choices it’s such a pretty design I think getting the fabrics wrong would be quite a challenge.

Then what to do with the resulting 5.5″ block. I’d had for sometime the Lola Pouch pattern from Svetlana of  SOTAK Handmade. Svetlana  is a seriously capable and prolific designer specialising  in bags and pouches and clearly has that sort of mind that can think in 3D construction terms. It reminded me of when I was invigilating a test for would be toolmaker apprentices back in my Personnel Graduate Trainee days and thought I would while away the time by taking the test. There I sat with my ‘A’ levels and a degree to find I could barely get to question 3 while the 15 year old lads (no girls, this was Yorkshire in the 80’s) romped through the questions. It was a very powerful lesson that ability and intelligence comes in many forms, many  of which I don’t have.

Fortunately the instructions were a great deal easier to follow than that test. Svetlana’s reputation for thorough and detailed instructions with plenty of pictures is well deserved.  I’ve made many zip pouches in the past but this one, with the binding along the top whilst it takes longer, it does make it special and I think in future this will be my go-to pouch. By the way Svetlana is having a Black Friday sale for all her patterns.

Now the techy bit. As I use my blog as a record of what I’ve made and how I’ve made it so that I can revisit the details if I need to here are the measurements. Switch off now if that’s not going to float your boat! Svetlana has two sizes of bags one small and yes you guessed it one large. Needless to say I wanted to make a middle sized version so I cut the pieces 11 x 5 and 11 x 3.75.  Looking at it critically I think it’s still a bit too big for my purposes. Next time I will shave off a further half an inch for each piece depth wise and 2 inches length wise.  Again looking at it critically although I used lightweight interfacing on the exterior pieces and fusible fleece 630 Vilene it could still be a bit sturdier . I think I will use Vilene 640 next time. The quilting does give it a bit of extra structure and hides the seams that you inevitably get with paper piecing.

Linking up to

Crazy Mom Quilts,

Elm Street Quilts,

BusyHandQuilt ,

TGIFF