Catter Walling

Today we hung the Love Me, Love My Cat quilt in the last available space on the wall of cats in my stairwell.  As I've explained before, I am lining the walls of the two stairwells in my house with cat quilts.  With the finish of this quilt, I've filled one wall.

Both stairwells in my home are enclosed, meaning there are walls on both sides, and so I can't get back to take a picture of the whole wall.  Instead, I'm going to show you all the quilts that are hung on this wall individually.  If a quilt is small enough, I could actually add a couple more to this wall, but anything larger will have to move to the other side.  So here are the other quilts.  For some reason, I have a feeling I've already blogged about this, but I was unable to find the post.  I figure if I can't find it or remember it, then maybe you can't either.

This one's official name is "Cat Nap", but I call it "If you Snooze, You Lose".  This was purchased as a kit.  I did a search to see if it was still available.  If you like this quilt, the kit is still available right here.

I call this next one "Catch as Cat Can".  It was free in a magazine, and it's been so long now that I can't remember where I got it.  Also, I don't remember its real name.  It was one of the first quilts I made, and my first attempt at free motion quilting.

This one is a Bigfork Bay Cotton pattern called "Maestro, I'm Ready", but I call mine "Mewsician".

You might remember this one called "Smitty's World" from the Dots on Dots blog hop.

And then there's this one...oh, wait.  That's the actual cat.  He's not very happy about the condition of his treat bowl.

This one was originally a free pattern from a magazine...well, free except for the price of the magazine.  Anyway, the quilt was designed by Nancy Brown, and she called it "Tooey" after her own cat, as I recall.  I called it "White Tie".  Actually, I made this quilt twice.  The second quilt was donated to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative with Nancy Brown's kind permission.

This is a Patrick Lose pattern called "A Cat for All Seasons," which is what I call it too.  It was one of my first applique quilts, and I finished it just about the time we had to put our 19-year-old kitty Krissy down.  She was the original third cat of the Three Cats Ranch, and she was a sweety.  

This is the label I made for Krissy's quilt.  We called her the "Gingerbread Cat".  Think of it this way:

Run, run, as fast as you can.

You can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread Cat

Now you know all you need to know about little Krissy.

I couldn't stand back far enough to get a good picture of this quilt, but here are the individual blocks.

Those are all the quilts on the first completed wall.  I do have a start on a second wall.  This quilt is the only quilt hanging on the second wall.  It is too large to fit on the first one, and so it got the second wall off to a good start.  This quilt is called "Let Sleeping Cats Lie".

So that's it for the cat walls.  

Today I started on my June NewFO project.  The linky party goes up one week from today.  Are you ready?

I was all set to start on the Forest Giants quilt, but then discovered that I was going to have to cut hundreds (multiple hundreds) of tiny pieces using templates.  When I discovered that, I cursed, I swore, I stomped my feet, I marched around and yelled.  Basically, I had a good rant about my hatred for templates.  There is only so much cutting with templates that I'm willing to do, and this pattern had far exceeded my limit.  

So, that stopped me dead in my tracks for a couple of hours while I decided what to do instead.  I was mad at myself for not looking at it earlier.  It didn't look like a quilt that would require templates, but that tells you how much I know.  Anyway...I had purchased some fabric to make it, which meant that unless I could find another similar pattern, those fabrics were going to supplement my already burgeoning stash.  Since I couldn't find anything suitable for those fabrics, I decided a scrap quilt was the best option.  At least that way I would be using up some different fabrics.

After searching through patterns, notebooks, boxes, and books, I finally settled on the cover quilt for this book:

It's called "The Birds Return", although I will undoubtedly give it a different name before all is said and done.

The pieces are all from scraps, but the poles and the bird house holes are made from consistent fabrics.  I selected these two from my stash.  I'll use the polka dots for the poles and the checks for the holes.

The rest, I'll choose as I go and use the picture of the quilt as a guide.  My goal would be to do one vertical row each time I work on this quilt.  Today, I cut out the first vertical row.  Tomorrow, I will sew it together.

So, it was a bit of a wasted sewing day once I decided to reboot, but I'm happy with my choice.

How about you?  Did you have a productive day in your sewing room or elsewhere?