Saturday, March 08, 2014

Whimsical Kitties

Here's a cute lap quilt I quilted a couple weeks ago.  I have never seen these cat panels that my client used. She said most of the other fabrics, which I discovered coordinated so sweetly, came from her stash.  This was a harder quilt to quilt because I was budget-poor.  I would have loved to have had more time to do more on the cat squares.  This can frustrate me, but fortunately the client didn't care.  Oh my, I just noticed that the top row of cats is upside down...wonder if she knows this too?!

To conserve costs, and avoid doing a true edge-to-edge, I looked for continuous-paths for the quilting around the cat squares.  The Terry-Twist is a great alternative to a real continuous curve (also called C-C) because no rulers are needed, and it is faster.  It gives a nice "swing" to the quilting too.  It was challenging here because in this section of squares, not all are square.  Some are rectangles.  In the black squares on point, I did curls, intended to look like cat's tails.  
She brought the batting, and it is a thinn-ish polyester, the type JoAnn's sells.  It doesn't really help the minimal quilting on the cat blocks, but again, that is life.  She likes it and that is really all that matters.  I used a greenish color Omni thread on all but the cats.  When you don't know what color to use, and the quilt has many, often quilters will tell you "baby-puke green", as it blends with many colors.  It's a nice shade of yellow-green, and I use it often.  The cats are stitched with black Omni.  I outlined a couple square frames, outlined around the outer greenery and then around the cat itself.
 It is fun to do these smaller quilts as they do quilt up relatively quickly.  The quilt that came after this was a 7-day doozy!...116"x105", pictures and a story next time.


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