Thoughts from Last Week - Butterflies

I’ve been working on the Butterfly series for a while now and liking the design more and more. I never thought of myself as a butterfly sort of person – all that fussy lightness just doesn’t feel like me actually. But there is something about this design that just resonates (well it should because it is, after all, my design – butterflies seen through my own particular lens). I’m not doing it because I thought commercially butterflies would be a good idea (which they are and it will be). This started as a design with an antique border pattern of flowers that I found in a very very old pattern book, and, by the time I was done, it was flowers and butterflies and antique monograms. The more I developed it, the more I enjoyed it. I am calling the pattern “Butterfly Memento” – because what I see is that its a moment in time – a summer day – poised and perfect with flowers and that butterfly – the butterfly itself is a moment – poised so briefly transforming from one state to another. A day, no matter how perfect, is always changing – like the flowers and the butterfly – you can’t press them or hold them – but you can remember them at that one perfect moment. So the colors are clear and bright, the frame and background are antique – the lettering and monogram are quaint. Even the blue flowers are Forget-Me-Nots.