Rounding Up Bunnies

Good morning, my friends! It's going to be a sandwich-building day here at the Three Cats Ranch. For sure and certain, today is the day we'll set up the sawhorse tables so that I can sandwich the newest round of quilts to be quilted. 

The bunnies and I had quite a day yesterday. I didn't really expect to finish them, but finished they are. I had a lot of help getting them done. Smitty was especially interested in this project. 

But patience, Grasshopper. We still needed to do our day's inchy. This one is a wrapped backstitch, lazy daisies, and French knots.

And then, we wasted no time putting away Valentine's Day and moving on to St. Patrick's Day. I put out the table topper for our breakfast bar. This was a pattern I adapted from Canoe Ridge Creations.

This table runner was another free pattern. It was originally a Valentine's Day pattern, but I simply swapped out the colors from reds and pinks to greens, and then swapped out the hearts for shamrocks, and Voila! I had myself a St. Patrick's Day runner. You can find the link to the original quilt-as-you-go pattern right here.

Finally, this little wall-hanging from a pattern I picked up when I traveled Ireland several years back. It was designed by Yvonne McKee, from Belfast.

So then, it was time to sew. Now, if you remember from yesterday's post, I'd measured and marked where the button eyes should go.

I just put a dot where the buttons would be sewn on, but I wanted to add the whiskers first.

I'd puzzled out a way to do it. Smitty was all over this. He was being his most energetic helper self for these bunnies.

So, I made a template from freezer paper, and I cut holes where the dots for the button eyes would go. This helped me get it aligned properly. Then, I ironed it to the quilt block so that it wouldn't shift.

Any resemblance to individual members of the Bunny KKK is completely coincidental.

Then, I just eyeballed where I wanted the whiskers to go. It didn't matter that they were all perfect for this one block, but I wanted to be consistent from block to block.

When I was satisfied with the whisker lines, I used my rotary cutter to cut a slot where the lines were.

Then, I ironed it to the block again and used tweezers to open up the slot.

Then, I could use my ruler and a pencil to draw the lines on the fabric.

This was a little tricky, and I wasn't completely happy with the results.

But then...duh...I realized I could just put a dot at both ends of the slot and draw the whiskers in with my ruler after I removed the template.

And that worked much better.

I wanted to stitch the whiskers and sew on the buttons through the batting. That way, I didn't need any stabilizer. From there, I went to work stitching all the whiskers. The triple stitch on my sewing machine works well for this sort of thing. All the thread tails were pulled to the back.

As you might guess, Smitty was all up in my business, helping all the way.

When the whiskers were finished. I sewed on the button eyes, and then added the quilt back.

From there, it was ready for quilting. I could have done this on my domestic machine, but it was a pretty day outside, and I wanted a window seat. I took it upstairs and did the quilting on Eliza. For the center patch, I did some dot-to-dot quilting.

Then, I did some backsy-forthsy-swoopity-whoopity quilting for the face. (Technical quilting terms. Try to keep up.) When I reached the whiskers, I did a loop for the bunny nose, and continued forming a heart around the eyes.

Then I did some loopity-swoopity things to get myself to where the ears were, and I quilted three ovals for the ears.

And then, it was ready to be squared up for binding. I found a different fabric to use for the binding. I was looking for this one the day before, but couldn't find it. Isn't this cute? It looks like cake sprinkles.

The quilt finished at 25 x 25 inches, and so it didn't take long to sew on the binding by machine...

And then finish it off by hand. Fortunately, Sadie stepped in. Smitty was 'zhausted by then.

And there you go. The Bunny Go Round table topper is a finish. Here's how it looks:

Here's how it looks from the back:

Okay, so I'd like to get a good start on my quilt sandwiches today. I doubt I can get them all done in a single day, nor do I want to. I'm hoping to have them all finished by tomorrow, however. My goal for today will be to finish 4-5 of the nine I have for sandwiching. If I can get that many done (and assuming there's still time left in the day), I'll be moving back to the top of my white board again to quilt the last of the previous stack of quilt sandwiches. The Dream Big Leaf panel has been lounging on Eliza for the past several weeks. After being on the bottom of the stack for more than a year, it had some deep creases. 

It was so much fun to quilt the original Dream Big dahlia panel, 

I wanted to do another one. It will be good practice for when I quilt the "Maps" quilt.

So with that, I need to get a move on. It's a resistance workout day for me...meaning, I'm working out on the Bowflex resistance machine. But don't think for one minute I'm not resisting working out on the resistance machine. Resistance or not, it's time to get going. On that, resistance is futile.