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.