Kitty Quilt squaring / Borders

Yesterday and today I tackled borders. I decided on going narrow with the piano keys border - it seems to me that the wider one just took from the whole quilt .. i had qualms about using kitty fabric as these aren't kitties, but with all the colours and fabrics used in this quilt, it was the easiest course of action for making all the colours make sense .. sort of cheating, but I know I would have agonized over my fabric colours - I would still be staring at a pile of fabric with no choices made.

I had a few waves in my quilt top that I couldn't get rid of by squaring, these are from a few pp patterns that I didn't want to frog or redo, I knew i could reduce the problem when putting on borders and then quilt out what was left if needed.

Basically:

Measured in 3 spots from side to side; 52", 51¹/4", 51¹/2" - average 51 ¹/2"

Measured in 3 spots top to bottom; 56", 56", 56¹/2" - average 56 ³/16" - let's call this one 56¹/4" - must be those pp blocks again rearing their ugly heads


For side to side - I needed to ease in ¹/2” on the top row and the bottom row was to size .. I used the longer side down on the feed dogs to help with the easing. Super easy to ease that amount over 52" and that wave that was there is beaten into submission now .. It's nice to see my quilt laying flat on the floor . yes there are a few bumps, but those are seams where I lost the battle of getting them flat and some stretching happened .. In this other picture, I had a nice little ski hill for ants going on .. nice and flat now! :D :D :D

I did the top and bottom borders then called it a night. I was to tired at that point and just didn't want to mess anything up.

The top and bottom went just as easily as the sides did. Just pinned them into place and away i went. There's a few waves there, but nothing i can't live with. I need to trim a bit on my borders, but all in all I think that I can say the top's done :D. Oh geeze .. I think my top's almost done!!

I need to do embellishments; tails, some whiskers - I want to put 4 more cats on, and get the heads and tails for the fan kitties ready for appliquilting - WOW ..

Kitty Top Done - AGAIN; appliqued Meeces - update on meeces

Regarding my meeces
Kyle walked in and asked me why I was putting hippos in my kitty quilt :\ .. I'm like .. are you kidding me!?!?!? First Reg says they look like igloos with bumps and now this .. Pix batted them around he's so disgusted with them - Okay I get the hint!! I pulled out my pp pattern and was going to just do up the meeces from that - then I look at the picture and see that they have ears on them .. I'm like ?!?!? There's no ears on the pattern .. so i dig out the instructions and saw that they have you premake them and put them in when you sew between 2 sections .. so here I am thinking, I can just add ears like that to these meeces .. frog out the area around the ears, snip them off, tuck the seam under and then make the ears (sew them right sides together, flip right side out), then attach them into the seam .. I would leave them 'loose' for now, but would quilt them down when I do the quilting :D :D :D - Any other suggestions on this????

After doing battle with squaring persnickety blocks, I am pleased with the result. Again the kitties relocated on me, but rather like this much better!

I was working on the meeces today - I was giong to try the fuse tape applique method for the meeces, but the sections are just to small to get any sort of purchase on .. the first one I tried looked like it was suffering from some form of mutantism .. soooo- needless to say, I had to toss that idea out the window. What I had to do, was hand applique. I am not a big fan it and doing 8 meeces didn't change my mind .. maybe for larger pieces, but not for the small piece I was working with .. I'm really tempted to feed these to the kitties at this point .. Not sure if doing paper piecing would be better .. I have a whack of paper piecing patterns for meeces .. I'll just have to see after I do the fish how I feel about them.

My Sunny Stars made it out the bag, separated into roughly 5 piles and ended back up in the bag again :S .. I do know what I'm going to do, just really didn't feel like doing all that measuring of blocks after I had finished squaring the blocks and evening up the rows. Plus these meeces :\ I'll get working on that soon .. might get as many as I can together and make that up into a family couch quilt. We'll just have to see. Reg told me that his quilt is to small for him (!) I measured it against him and made sure it was okay before I put the borders on .. oh well, I've been wanting to try a string quilt ;) Like I needed an excuse LOL

Wandering Kitties / Sunny Stars

Yesterday I measured my quilt for the borders; holybiblebatman!! I knew that it was out of square, but it was bad .. there are 5 rows in this quilt and of the 3 that I measured, not one was the same or even close and the difference between all measurements was 1¹/2". This just wasn't going to do. I did notice that the bottom of the quilt top had a VERY friendly wave it in. I didn't even need to think about it it, Frogging I go. I separated all the rows and took a good look at where the waves were. I didn't have to square up as many blocks as I had thought, but when I did one, I needed to do the rest of the blocks in that row so that the blocks would all be the same size. Fussy? Anal? You betcha - But i do now want to have to see and battle the size difference. Heh, and wouldn't you know, the little buggers moved around on me again .. there was one cat who's tail was upside down that I did take apart and fix, and he's relocated from the bottom of the quilt to the top of the quilt :)

The whole process was very tiring, but I'm glad that it's done. All the rows are back together now and just waiting for me to join them up again .. I was soo bloody tired last nite, I didn't dare. I've started to piece on my 15 and have to find a happy medium between the edge of the machine bed and the table so I didn't want to have to battle the length / weight of my rows. Plus, the sewing room is right next to our bedroom and I didn't want to wake reg up moving machines around .. With the 15 on a TV tray, it's the same height of the table so it can take the weight and I won't have to battle with it. I've remeasured my rows (after I moved them around I didn't know what row went with what measurement) and will trim them soon. The meeces and fish colours have been decided upon, Joanne in NZ is sending me some black to do silhouettes, so things are well in hand again for my kitty quilt.

As I was drifting off to sleep last nite / this AM (?), I started to think about my Sunny Stars Swap quilt that I ran a number of years ago. I got these blocks at all different sizes. There was a test line on the pattern that needed to be measured, but they didn't do it - the result, 5 different sizes. while I had enough for a double quilt, I didn't have enough of one size to make said quilt. What I will do is take the smaller ones and frame them in blue (dark or light depending on block background) and use yellow in the cornerstones - I was thinking of doing a dark light graduation of block colours .. so that will be going up on my design wall later today.

Kitty quilt top done!

The day has finally arrived. I was honestly thinking that it would never come. I finally got the top together and somewhat squared for my kitty quilt. I had actually got it all pieced last nite, but was so bloody tired that I just didn't want to trim it for fear of destroying it. So it sat with ragged edges and all. heh .. this thing was a like a huge fabric puzzle for me. I had one row done and actually ripped it all apart as I moved some blocks. Not a day went by that these blocks didn't migrate to other sections of my quilt. I need to read up on squaring quilt tops as this one as a few little waves in it - i will do this before I cut and baste :).

Quilting this will be pretty straight forward for the most part. I'm going to use freemotion quilting and outline all the kitties in the quilt, will do some other motifs in the blank spaces. Not sure exactly what yet, but I'm sure it will come to me .. for some reason I'm thinking of butterflies **shrug** Lord knows why .. could be Judi's fault ;P.

The only offshoot for the quilting is to be the heads and tails for the fan kitties (notice they are headless and tailless now?? 1^st row and 4^th row). I'm going to use appliquilt for this. Meaning that they will be attached to the quilt and quilted at the same time. I'll use fusible tape to turn down the edges of the tail and head (almost thinking of raw edge applique for the tails so they fray a bit), secure it to the top with either a dab of glue stick or fusible web and quilt them into place in one shot! I sooo like that idea .. I will do a practice piece first to see if I can do .. if it doesn't work, you'll not need technology to hear my scream.

While doing some research today joanne sent me a link from a blog, Mary Johnson has some phenominal quilts and ideas. I contacted her with what I proposed. She also seems to think it'll work, along with most of the ladies from my quilt lists. BTW .. if you have a problem spot in your quilt she has a very ingenious method for fixing it, this could use for anything from bleeding colours to holes. She showed me a quilt that was all done with blues and she had quilted it, then added appliqued fishies to it afterwards .. gorgeous quilt! Be sure to check out her quilts, they are linked off her blog - it will be time well spent. Mary, Thank you!

I also pulled out an old blanket that I was thinking of using for Kyle's batting. It might work-ish. I'll have to trim a wee bit off the top and bottom to make it fit, but if I do do that, I can use those for my binding strips - at that point, I might as well take it from all sides :)