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A close up section of Butterflies At The Crossroads. Click to see the full collage.

Butterflies At The Crossroads, a 7-foot square collage-quilt, was made by fourth, fifth and sixth graders at Bemiss Elementary (Spokane, WA) as an after-school project in May 2002. It was sponsored by 21st Century Community Learning Centers.
The quilt is composed of four traditional quilt patches:

  1- The patch used on the outer “ring” is called Butterfly At The Crossroads. This pattern’s straight lines let students become comfortable with the recyclables used to make the quilt patches so they could pay attention to the colors and images they were choosing.

  2- The patch of the next level is Pieced Butterfly. This patch introduced curves and added a challenge to quilt patch creation.

  3- Next is Butterfly In Angles. It introduced “abstraction” and how color can be used to convey feeling.

  4- At the center (the heart) of the composition is a Lily, a flower patch to attract and refresh the butterflies. This single patch gives a heightened context to the piece: butterflies are part of the natural world; and, the result of good decisions (decisions, as implied by “crossroads” – time for decision making) is purity (the Lily), beauty.

The color of the quilt is predominantly yellow, concentric rings of yellow, so that it also functions as a sun, the source of life) and glows.

Butterflies At The Crossroads was designed to be hung in the lobby of Bemiss Elementary to complement the existing fabric butterfly mobile that floats there.

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