Cat Quilts

 I have been cleaning and sorting and purging and making a ever enlarging mess.  I do have a plan in mind but until I can move some of my sorted things along, I am not making a lot of progress. 

Sometimes you just have to sew, even in the middle of the chaos.  I have a lot of cat fabric and as I have mentioned before A LOT of scraps. My new neighbor has 2 young cats who have no quilts.  I can fix that. The cat who received the quilt I made last month was pleased with his quilt so I am encouraged to make more. Cat quilts are fun to make and I have a number of cats in mind to be the recipients. I have plenty of raw material for making quilts and they will hopefully use up a respectable amount of fabric and batting. I will also be able to keep on sorting and purging and when I need a break I can make cat quilts. 

This is front and back of a previously made quilt. It is about 24 inches square. I had used odd shaped scraps of assorted cat fabric and a lot of short strips. I quilted in the ditch around the strips.

Below, is the quilt I just made. It is also about 24 inches square and it was a panel so it just needed a border. I quilted around the squares and around the individual cats. I am using only what I have so although I would have liked to use a print on the back to hide my quilting stop and start knots, I used a plain allover print. That's what is nice about cats they won't care.

I am working on another child's alphabet quilt from a different panel than the last one. More about that another time. I do need to get it finished quickly so I have organized the current mess in my sewing room in a way that will give me space to work and space to sort.

My plan is to work my way through each bag or box at a time and put away or dispose of everything in each one before I drag out another box or bag. No more opening another one because there are things in different places that go together.

Bonus Quilt

 Some of us call them free quilts but, as my husband pointed out to me, they are not really free. However a bonus is just as good as free. There are leftovers from the Alphabet quilt and I do not want to add any more scraps to my overwhelming collection of scraps.  This is the bonus quilt made with the Alphabet leftovers and a block from my leftover blocks box and a piece of flannel for backing that was leftover from making flannel board for a kids activity at church. 

It is 26 inches square.

At one time, I asked The Friendship group for 12 inch Anvil blocks with improv centers and bright color HST's. I think I made a top and sent it to Victoria Findlay Wolfe. On her blog, she had asked  for Anvil blocks with blue backgrounds to make quilts for cancer patients.

 I found three leftover Anvil blocks in my block box.  Days earlier, I had found an extra large zip lock bag with a bunch of leftover pieces of various Laurel Burch fabrics, I wanted to use the block and the LB cat fabric and the HST"s and the striped fabric were perfect together. So I replaced the center improv pieced square with the LB cat fabric. 

I've had fun with this, I didn't obsess over every little thing and my workmanship is pretty good but not perfect, after all, THIS IS FOR A CAT AND I HOPE HE LIKES IT.

As I started putting things away, I found three more boxes of scraps that are unsorted. This is what happens when when I need to clean up my sewing space in a hurry. I stuff things in boxes and then never get back to it.  Who would believe that when I finished my first bed quilt in 1985 I thought that was the only quilt I would ever make?  And who would ever think that I would have accumulated so much stuff?

Finished!

I finished the Alphabet quilt on Tuesday. I woke up early and that gave me a big chunk of time to sew the binding. 

 I altered my technique for fusing the binding on the back before I stitch it down from the front. Today I left the paper on the 1/4 inch strips of fusible web and ironed them on the edge of the binding. After it cooled I removed all the paper and folded the binding to cover the stitches and fused the binding. I was easier than folding and pressing and then tucking the almost invisible fusible under the folded binding. 

I decided that using my walking foot was really a bad idea for the kind of quilting I was doing on the panel. iItwas not only tedious but my hands hurt from turning and twisting and stuffing the quilt under the arm of the machine. I set up my machine for free motion and hoped for the best. It turned out OK. My stitches were not always consistent but they were within the acceptable range and I improved as I went along. As I started each letter and animal I planned what i intended to do and it worked out OK most of the time. There were a few times that I got lost and ended up where I had to end my stitching and start again in another place. 

These two sections turned out to different to stitch than I expected. I thought the branches and leaves would give me a problem working out the direction to meander around them. It was intuitive easy after all.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   I though the fish would be easy but I got lost and had to take out some of the stitching.  It is not perfect but I am happy with it nonetheless.                                                                                         I guess free motion quilting is still an option for now.

Overall the density of the stitching over the entire quilt is consistent. The quilt is nice and flat and would hang well though I hope it will be used and not hung on a wall.

I have learned that I can adjust to my changing  abilities and to all the things that have altered the amount of sewing/playing time I have,

I did have another big frustration. When I was free motion quilting the foot control quit working again. This time I didn't pitch a fit over it. I just turned off the machine and folded up the quilt and went and did some housekeeping chores. I considered that maybe I should just buy a new machine. I was also thinking about what I was doing before it happened. Just as the first time, I had taken a break after I had wound some bobbins. I looked at the bobbin winding switch and it looked like it was switched for winding the bobbin. I turned the machine on, flipped the switch and guess what. It worked. This is not the first time this  happened but it has been a long time since it did. That is probably why I didn't think of it. The problems with my original l foot pedal were because my cat had chewed the cord. I guess I was still in the mindset that there was something wrong with the wiring on the new foot pedal. I am trying to let myself off the hook for being such a dunce. At any rate I am so relieved that I don't have to buy another foot pedal or worse yet another machine.