Sixth Butterfly Completed

I finished a sixth butterfly for The Butterfly Project. Before crocheting this one, I had purchased some more colors of thread since I had used the colors I had on hand and was ready for some new colors.

At the local Wal-Mart, they stock two brands of size 10 crochet thread--Aunt Lydia's and DMC. Color-wise, the DMC variegated pastels looked quite different from the Aunt Lydia's variegated pastels (which I already have), so I got a ball of that and a ball of really pretty pastel green. There was no green in the Aunt Lydia's bins, but there was a nice pastel blue that I'll probably use for the next butterfly.

As soon as I started crocheting this butterfly with the new DMC thread, I discovered why the DMC is priced lower than the Aunt Lydia's. It has less twist and splits more easily than the Aunt Lydia's and also seems fuzzier than the Aunt Lydia's. This was a surprise since DMC was always considered the preferred brand of embroidery thread when I was doing a lot of cross-stitch.

I do love these two colors of the DMC, though, so it was worth dealing with the lesser quality of thread to produce this butterfly. The thread was easier to deal with when I switched to a size 6 steel hook instead of the size 7 I had used for the previous two butterflies.

For this butterfly, I used the butterfly portion of this doily pattern, but I left the dots off of the wings, and I modified the body since the first try using the instructions as written resulted in too long of a body that was not in proportion with the wings, which I had already completed. This may be because the pattern calls for size 30 thread, and I was using size 10. Instead of an initial chain of 25, I tried chaining 15 and decreased the other stitches accordingly while trying to maintain the proportions of the stitches, and this yielded a better result.