Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Butterfly Shapes & Symmetry

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Over the summer we had a lot of fun with some felt pieces cut into the shape of butterflies, exploring different shapes, patterns and so on. One theme that came up a lot was symmetry, a concept my eldest has a disproportionate amount of difficulty with and which was new to my youngest girl. By cutting out butterfly shapes and using the idea of cutting on a fold to get matching sides, we covered quite a lot of educational concepts. Then we cut out pairs of pieces of felt to decorate them and used buttons to embellish our efforts. It culminated in a summer butterfly picture but much fun was had along the way.

butterfly shapes in feltHere are just a few of what we designed. Although it was a simple activity it was a great deal of fun and the designs got more complex as the activity went on. We had intended to sew edges and embellishments to them and hang them as a mobile. It didn’t happen this year but I think we will do it, probably with a few other insects too.

Anyway, the purpose of this rather tardy post is to include the download of printable butterfly shapes I made. Each is a ‘half’ butterfly so you can cut them out on paper or fabric and work on symmetry yourself! 😉

Easy Crochet Butterflies

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The internet is full of ideas for crocheting and knitting insects and goodness knows they are all better at it than me but one of the great things about crochet is that once you have hold of a basic stitch (a double crochet in the UK, a single crochet if you are in the US) you can have a good stab at creating something even with very little expertise. So, with summer fading fast, we bring you a ‘Maddy Makes’!

The beauty of letting someone just ‘go’ with something like crochet is seeing what they make of it. Maddy is 12 and has only just learned to crochet and she approached this from a very different angle to I would have. She crocheted a doubled length to be the body, then attached the green and crocheted a circle inwards to make the wings. I think I might have done the circles and finished off by stitching them to a tube of crochet but I quite like what she ended up with. She had a lot of fun inventing her butterfly and photographing it in the garden anyway, so who cares!

Here are some other patterns to try:-

Little Birdie Secrets

The obligatory Pinterest selection

King Soleil

Craft Passion

And a book I like too is 75 Birds and Butterflies to Knit & Crochet

Maddy used Rowan Hand Knit Cotton (nice and easy to hold and crochet) and a 4mm hook.

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Button Butterfly Card Toppers

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A year or so ago, I sat my then 6 year old with a tray full of buttons and left her to play. To my surprise, she was still there, hours later, making pictures as happily as Larry 🙂 (Who is this Larry, I ask myself?)

I liked all her efforts so much that I started a Pinterest board to collect other ideas and since then, buttons seem to have just taken off as the latest craft fad. [Read more…]

Hand Sewn Butterfly & Flower Felt Picture

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Summer is nearly over and all those crafts are nearly ready to be put to bed for another year…. flowers, butterflies, rainbows and blossoming trees will soon give way to harvest, russet leaves, Halloween and fireworks. Even the glimmer of snow and Christmas doesn’t seem so very far away. I’ve got a few more pretties that we made this year still up my sleeve though and wanted to show the picture our summer header came from. It’s part of a set I’m making for the wall of our new baby boy when he moves into his own room, the first being the tree picture this site started with.

I’ve got a real soft spot for this sort of folky and simple hand stitched picture, particularly as it copes so well with a cheaty bit of gluing to keep it quick and easy. Blanket stitch (ooh, some interesting varieties there!) and back stitch or simple long stitches add detail to felt without having to be too slavishly careful and felt is very forgiving when being cut and shaped (along with being cheap!) so a few mistakes won’t matter.

Without being too prescriptive, since creativity is key rather than following a slavish pattern, cut out some daisy petal shapes and a circle, which I added long stitch detail to to give it some interest. Add some wiggly leaves or grass stems and glue them all into place. The butterfly is blanket stitched (from a template I will be providing here shortly) and the bottom is cut from a dark piece of felt the same size as the blue background and given a wiggly edge and some back stitched detail for interest. I love buttons, so sticking those on as flowers and butterfly pattern worked really well. If you are doing this with a child, it is a great opportunity to explore symmetry too. Once it is all glue together, it will look great inside a picture frame and popped up on a wall.

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