Rogues' Gallery

Every time I hang another quilt in the Mewseum of Cat Quilts, I say it's hanging in the last available spot on the first wall. And then, I manage to squeeze in one more. Today, I hung Smitty's portrait below Gracie's.

And now, I think I really have filled the whole wall.

In a desperate moment, I might be able to hang one more there beside Smitty, but if you could see the wall in person, you'd know that it would be hard for a visitor to the Mewseum to see it without getting down on hands and knees. As for me, I try to avoid that position. 

If you've never seen the Mewseum before today, then I'll just explain by saying that our house has two enclosed stairwells. I'm endeavoring to fill all four walls with nothing but cat quilts. It's my version of the crazy cat lady except that this purrticular crazy cat lady comes in the form of a mewseum curator. If you want to see the other cats in the gallery, you can see them right here.

With Smitty finished, I desperately needed to clean up the sewing room. Those portrait quilts are very messy. When I had that cleaned up, I decided to pull out the next project on my list. It's time to work on the next section for the Wind in the Whiskers quilt. This block is called Best of Show, and it can be made either as a part of the larger quilt, or on its own as a wall hanging. Here's the section I'm working on. Since I'm making the whole quilt, I'll only be doing the center section within the lavender stop border.

My intention was just to sort through the fabrics and get things organized, but I ended up making the dogwood blossoms

and the bee.

Then, we left to go see a movie (Bridge of Spies...great movie!), and so I covered everything over with a big ruler. There are gremlins in our household, and so little items like this must be well protected when they are otherwise unsupervised.

I've been spending all of my time in the sewing room the past several days, and so today I simply must do a little housework. There should still be plenty of time to continue on with this. Today, I'll be making this cat. It consists of 21 separate pieces.

I won't be able to make the whole block because it overlaps with sections of other blocks previously made. You can see that the tree trunk, branches, and leaves intersect with four separate blocks.

Here's what the whole quilt looks like. I've made all but the bottom section, and so I think I could reasonably start sewing the sections together once this one is finished. The only remaining section is the one across the bottom, and it doesn't intersect with any of the others.

I might go ahead and sew the upper part together since I'll have it fresh in my mind. Also, I have a lot of loose pieces floating around. They're all enclosed in envelopes and labeled, but it would be nice to have it all fused down and sewn together.

So that's my day today. The weather continues stormy, and we've had more than three inches of rain since Wednesday. Yesterday, we had a nice sun break with blue sky while the eye of the storm passed over us. When we were out last night, it was raining sideways. Just as I'm writing this, there's a bit of sunlight, but the fog is moving in. I expect the house will be enveloped before the hour is up. There is more rain in the forecast, but I think we've seen the worst of it.