Nearing a Finish

Getting an early start yesterday morning left me with enough time in the day to mostly finish my Feelings/Emotions challenge quilt. I am dying to show it to you, but we'll all have to wait until the reveal on February 1st. For now, I can show you these little bits and pieces.

Since I keep showing this same section, I'll just keep going with it. The medium variegated thread worked out okay. Frankly, I'm not sure any thread could have covered this range of fabric values, and so this one was as good as any.

It was good to have this part done. It was one of the scarier parts of my collage. Smitty had my back for this...or maybe I had his back. He was attempting to point me in the direction of his empty catnip dish.

We had bunches of volunteer catnip in the garden last year, and we dried a bagful for the kitties. They really like it!

Okay, with catnip dispensed, I could continue on with the darkest portions of my collage. I was pretty sure I would like this darker variegated thread, and it worked out perfectly. It's so frustrating not to be able to show you more!

There were a few more details to add in, but then I was ready to quilt the open areas around the collage. I used a swirling meander for that. Ordinarily I would stitch down all the raw edges of the applique, but for this piece, I made sure to put plenty of quilting over those spots, but otherwise left them unstitched. This is a quilt for the wall, not for the wash.

After that, the only thing left was to quilt the border. I'm not showing you the border fabric, because that would give too much away. I'm showing you how it looks from the quilt back...and there's that crystal quilt back fabric.

Okay, so the binding is sewn on by machine. The image below gives you a tiny peak at the border fabric. The inner border and binding are made from one of Vicki Welsh's pretty hand-dyed blues. You can see more of Vicki's fabrics right here. 

Now it's ready for hand-stitching and this challenge will be finished. It was one of the more difficult and scary quilts I've made, but I'm very happy with the outcome. Today I'll spend my slow-stitching time hand-sewing the binding. The quilt ends up at 20 x 27 inches, and so it shouldn't take too long.

So I'm sorry I can't show you the whole thing. Believe me...no one is any sorrier than I am. Instead, allow me to show you these consolation cats:

There's not much on the agenda today. There is one most-hated housekeeping chore, and so I'll probably get at that first to get it out of the way...or maybe put it off until tomorrow...or the next day...or the next. Why, the procastination possibilities are positively endless! When that's done (or not done), I'll get back to finishing off the Never Enough Cats quilt top.

My fabrics are all laid out to add borders around the center embroidery. After that, I'll be making a dozen appliqued cats. There are only a couple of sewing days left before some serious Thanksgiving cooking.