Blogger's Quilt Festival: A Kitten's Tale

Thank you for viewing my entry to the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  I'm so glad you stopped by!  For this entry, I'm showing you my combination embroidery/applique quilt, A Kitten's Tale.  

This quilt was a block-of-the-month from the pattern by the very talented Lynette Anderson, who uses her own cat and dog as her models.

In fact, they are standing on Lynette's version of her quilt in this image.  Cute, huh?

The following images will show you each block individually.  It was such fun to make this quilt.  Lynette's critters are so adorable that it made her pattern a delight to work on.  Here is the happy family:

This next block was the first of the series.  I hadn't yet dedicated myself to hand embroidery, and so this one was free motion machine embroidered on my domestic sewing machine.  After doing this block, I decided to get into the swing of hand embroidery and the rest of the blocks on the quilt are all embroidered by hand.  Those of you who read my blog regularly know that where embroidery is concerned I've never looked back.

Quilt Along with Kitty:

Forever friends (is this adorable, or what?):

Home Sweet Home (looks a lot like my house):

Welcome friends:

Here's another block that looks a lot like my house.  Kitty is pretty comfortable on that pile of quilts:

Kitten in the tree:

The last blocks were the top and bottom inner borders.  This was my first experience with yo-yo's, and these are about the size of a dime.  I ended up making 74 yo-yo's in all.  

It was quite a learning project to work on this quilt.  It was my first experience with yo-yo's and my first experience with raw-edged applique.  It was also one of the first hand-embroidered quilts that I completed.

I was fortunate to already have a perfect backing fabric in my stash, although I only had half as much as I needed.  I was able to purchase the additional yardage I needed and the back turned out just as cute as the front.

This quilt was quilted by a very talented long arm quilter named Tami Ortega.  Tami broke my heart when she left the business a couple of years ago.  I asked her to quilt paw prints and hearts on it, but otherwise left the design up to her.  It was quilted free hand on her long arm machine, and I think she did a great job on it.  Her quilting is the reason this is one of my favorite quilts ever.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing my quilt.  Thanks for stopping by!  To return to the Blogger's Quilt Festival, just click on the button at the top of this post.