The Final Feline

It seems like a night to pop open a bottle of champagne because the cat blocks are FINISHED!!

This morning I went down and did all the top-stitching on the final feline.

Only, the second I snapped that image, I remembered that I still hadn't stitched the whiskers on. Doh! So I took care of that before continuing.

At this point I stopped because I had to make a quick trip to the grocery store. There were only 18 items on my list for Thanksgiving, and so it wasn't too bad. The store wasn't even very crowded, but there was that feeling of panic in the air. I was very glad I didn't need to be there for long.

When I got home, I put the borders on the block.

Then I was ready to attach this cat to his brothers and sisters on the quilt. Fortunately, I had Smitty there helping me with the block layout.

He's been exceedingly helpful with this quilt...and I mean "exceedingly" in every sense of the word.

I started by sewing the third row to the top half of the quilt because I still needed to add the dragonfly above the middle block. This morning I had something of a brainstorm about the dragonfly. A dragonfly is sort of a blingy bug if you ask me. Here's a picture of one I took on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state. Look at how delicate its wings are, and it even has a little bling on the edges of each one.

 It occurred to me that I might be able to use Angelina Fibers for the wings.

If you're not familiar with Angelina Fibers, you can watch a video from Embellishment Village right here. I bought these some time ago, when I made this quilt for my neighbor. The Angelina Fibers are what give the tree its shimmer.

So they're kind of like angel hair and they look like this when you take them out of the bag.

You need to use a pressing sheet or parchment to keep them from sticking to things, but in general, they only adhere to themselves. I kind of like using parchment because I can fold it over and cover both top and bottom.

Then you press them with a cool iron (silk setting) and they sort of melt together to form a shimmery sheet of pseudo-fabric.

I wasn't sure what would happen if I tried using fusible web with them, but it worked just like fabric. The dragonfly is going into the checkerboard sashing, and I didn't want that checkerboard showing through, so after I'd added fusible to the Angelina fibers, I fused them to the fabric I'd been planning to use originally, and I had my dragonfly wings. Cool! The shimmer doesn't show up very well in this image, but it's there.

Then I fused the whole dragonfly to the sashing and top-stitched it with gold metallic thread.

And to give it just a little more bling, I gave it two tiny hot-fix crystal eyes.

Edited to say that the Angelina Fibers aren't new to me, but trying to fuse them is. I'm linking this post to:

Then I finished sewing the blocks together and voila! 

Phew! That was quite a job. I am so happy to have all the blocks finished. Depending on how I feel tomorrow, I might finish adding the borders and have the whole top finished (quite likely). On the other hand, I might decide I can't stand to look at it one more minute and go back to quilting a Gardener's Journal. I can always add the borders to this one when I get ready to quilt it.

As long as we're talking about borders, I wanted to show you the fabric I have for the back and outer border. I can't remember when I bought this fabric, but it was probably shortly after I started the quilt. I thought it was perfect. And just to show you how extra perfect I thought it was, about a year ago, I bought it all over again when I saw it in a quilt shop. When I came home to put it away, I was quite surprised to see that I already had the exact same fabric. The quilt gods must be telling me something.

Anyway...there you have it.

Now, about that champagne...