A Quilt for Michou

My neighbor and friend, Ethel, has the most wonderful cat, a marmalade guy named Michou.  He comes to the door whenever I go over (most likely because I feed him when Ethel is away, or perhaps he figures when the door opens he can escape).  I have long wanted to make him (them) a quilt and finally got around to it.

My sit-and-sew quilt group calls this pattern the People Quilt, because Nancy first made it with a fabric with, well, lots of people on it.  She also made it with horses.  So I decided to make it with cats.  It's a quick-and-easy quilt, just two blocks, a nice lap size.  The graphic one is a 10" square, the pieced one is just rotated every other row.   

The back, of course, had more cats. 

I ordered the backing fabric online, which I prefer not to do, but my LQS didn't have anything  that struck me, and I was anxious to get this done in time for the winter holidays, including Ethel's and my shared birthday in December.

Unfortunately, the print was totally off-grain.  I hung the fabric over railing by the stairs between the 1st and 2nd floors, with the selvege corners matching.  By the time it got to the bottom edge, it was off by over 8".  Yikes!   Laying it out selvege to selvege, this is what I saw.

I solved the problem by cutting the fabric into 5 sections vertically, 2 narrow ones that I bordered with fabric left over from the front, and 3 wider ones that I was able to keep relatively flat.  That kept the twisting to an undetectable minimum.  SCORE!  In fact, Ethel likes the back more than the front.  Michou seems happy either way.

I wish I could find the photos of Michou with his quilt.  It was quite extraordinary when I gave it to him.  He moved aside as Ethel folded it up and put it on the sofa.  He sniffed at it for a bit, then tentatively placed a paw on it.  Over several minute he put up one paw, then another, until he was standing on top.  Gradually he lay down (imagine a manlift coming back to the ground) and adjusted himself to the desired position.  And that was that.  He had always slept on Ethel's' bed, but that night he stayed right there on the quilt and refused to move.  The next night, too.  Isn't it nice when someone is genuinely thrilled with the quilt that you made for them?

 Rhododendron Trail, At Last

In my last post, I mentioned that I didn't much like this quilt when it was finally done.  It languished on my quilt rack for a long time, until my friend Linda and her husband came from North Carolina to visit us on Long Island.  She is a wonderful quilter (see some of her quilts here) and she has a special talent for making me feel competant and re-kindling my love of quilting whenever we see each other.  She assured me that I'd like the quilt more after it was quilted, and she volunteered to quilt it for me at no charge.  What a friend indeed!!

Last year we met up in Florida and she took the quilt home to work her magic.  This week we met in Florida again and she brought along the quilt.  

Linda was right.  I do like it better.  Of course, absence makes the heart grow fonder, too.  I'm glad that she took her sweet time getting this done.  (Sorry, the palm tree photo-bombed this!).

Here you can see where all those flying geese found a home.  If I had known that this would be the border, I probably would have given up before I ever started.  I'm so glad I persisted!  

The back of the quilt is a pretty teal that Linda and I found while shopping in Ft. Myers last year.  Look closely and you can see the quilt motif that Linda chose.  I told her to just pick what she thought would be good, and I do think it's perfect.

This week we went back to the same quilt shop to pick out some fabric that I needed to make my next quilt top.  Of course, we ended up with teal -- there's lot of pink in this new quilt, too.  I'm not a huge pink fan, and I think some teal (my favorite color) helps me enjoy sewing all that pink.  Just getting started, you can follow my progress in the weeks to come.

Another Quiltville Mystery solved!

JOINING MR. PEABODY IN THE WAY-BACK MACHINE

Hello, and happy Quilting Month! 

After an on-lie absence of two years (!!!), I am finally resuming my quilty posts.  I'm not sure why I've been hibernating.  In part it's been because I've been busy sewing, without actually finishing much.  In part it's been because I've been less than thrilled with the results of my endeavors. Often I neglecged to take photos, which are the heart of my quilting diary.  And I've let myself get distracted by useless wastes of time (e.g., online jigsaw puzzles).  Whatever.  I guess most quilters sometimes have days, weeks, even months when they just can't get their mojo going.  At least I was sewing, just dropped the posting. 

2021-2023:  Rhododendron Trail

Every November, Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com comes up with another amazing mystery quilt project.  How she manages to write a daily blog, host groups of quilters in her Quiltville Inn, write books and magazine columns, and still design, stitch, and quilt so many quilts is beyond me.  I'd completed two of her mystery quilts, but didn't embark on them until after the Reveal, so I knew what I'd be making.  In 2021, I threw caution to the winds and started right off when the mystery, called Rhododendron Trail, started.   I should have known I was in trouble when the second clue was to make 124 flying geese.  Eeek!

After all that, I didn't even use them until the very last step in the project!  But no worries, there were plenty more triangles to do.  There were triangles sewed to half-square triangles.

Which of these things is not like the others?

There were quarter-square triangles.

There were great, big triangles.

Of course, there were plenty of squares and rectangles, too.  And then there was the sashing that finished at 1/2". 

I found this quilt to be challenging, in the cutting as well as the sewing.  Normally I enjoy a challenge, but more than a year later, when I finally finished the quilt top, I didn't really like it.   Many of my friends did liked it, but not I.  I think it was the color combinations.  Maybe that's part of why I stopped blogging in 2023?).

Bonnie Hunter's patterns are very well written.  She is a teacher, and it shows in the details she gives in explaining not only how, but WHY, to do things.  And in this experience I did learn an important thing about reading the mystery directions.  In the introductory post, she shows the colors that she has used and how much yardage to buy if you are not doing the quilt scrappy.  I've done all 3 of her quilts scrappy, but the thing I hadn't considered was that by reading the yardage amounts, I'd have had an idea before beginning about the proportions of each color that will be in the quilt.  If I'd read the yardage directions, I'd have known that there was going to be a lot of pink and hardly any teal.   I think I would have liked this quilt a lot more if I'd altered how each color was used, and maybe even swapped some out.  Lesson learned.

More on Rhododendron Trail in the next post.