Appliqued, Awesome Cat Quilt Adventure

I have been quilting with a dwindling group of ladies at a fading church since 2004. When I started there were about ten ladies. Four remain. In my sixties, I am the youth of the group. This group used to be large enough to have two quilting frames going at the same time with 4 people quilting down each side of the quilts. I hear stories of those women coming to quilt almost anytime during the week. They made beautiful quilts and kept pictures in a note book. I scanned those pages onto a disc to preserve them. Today we quilt on Mondays, unless it is a holiday or the weather is bad, or someone is going out of town.

My mother and her mother quilted, but not together. I have their frame in my attic, but at home I make bobbin lace or knit. I remember playing under the large quilt when my grandmother took me to the W.S.C.S. meetings as a little girl. My mother's quilting was a more solitary affair involving only two of her cousins. She hand pieced her quilts in the summer and started quilting after the Christmas tree came down. When I tried to quilt on my mother's quilt, she ripped out my stitches. It might have been kinder to keep her mouth shut, but we seem to be compulsive truth tellers so my feelings were hurt.

The ladies from the church took me in hand and taught me what I know about quilting. One of the ladies has macular degeneration, but she loves to quilt. Her stitches are good, except that she can't tell where her needle comes out of the fabric, so sometimes puts it back in pretty far from its exit. She has a number of quilt tops waiting so we could quilt into eternity. I decided that I wanted to have a quilt that was quilted by my friends, and knew that I would have to hurry or it would have to wait for us to finish another quilt for her.

I decided to put together a quilt top with very little help, but the knowledge of the complaints that we made while quilting other quilts and some books to read. I was bored with the traditional Double Wedding Ring, Log Cabin kind of thing and wanted something special. I had books from my favorite cousin about appliqué and also about how to draw cat silhouettes that could become appliqués. I wanted cats that look like my cats - Somalies have big ears and fluffy tails. Almost every picture had to be adjusted a bit before it was cut out and put onto the panel of fabric.

Like every beginner project, there is something really important that I didn't know. If I were doing it again, those panels would all be the same size, but I tried to make up for the differences by having wider borders. That helped some, but not enough. There were still areas that needed fluffing out so I put small squares of fabric in some places. That worked out well in the quilting. Every other square was plain and we quilted paw prints in them. I was careful to include straight quilting which I like and curvey quilting which one of the ladies prefers, so we had something for everyone.

I took pictures of the quilt before I took it to the church. It was hot off the ironing board when I left the house. I had been careful to press all the seams to the darker side of the borders so it was obvious where we were to quilt. When I went to pick up the bottom fabric, I was too frazzled or ignorant to figure out how much to get, so I got the wider fabric that is made especially for quilting. My quilt ended up being extra large since our bed is not really designed to have skirts.

As we quilted they decided that I needed to quilt whiskers and a few leg lines on some of the cats because of the distance across the individual cat. That seemed like a good idea, so I did it in a dark blue thread. I drew the line when they told me we should put jingle bells on the cats, or googly eyes on each cat. We make those kinds of suggestions as we quilt. One quilt that we did had a swan quilted in certain squares. We called that swan a goose, or duck or whatever else we could think of, anything but a swan. We started my quilt at the end of September. We didn't meet a couple of times in December and February was so snowy that we didn't quilt together at all. We finally took the quilt from the frame in April. I was especially pleased that one of our ladies who has moved away came to quilt with us one day. She is especially nice and we miss her cheery face.

When we took my quilt out of the frame, I was stunned by how beautiful it is. I have sewn the binding on and washed the last of the marking pen out. You can see the picture of the quilt when they held it up at the church. Those little hands peeking over the top edge worked hard on it. If you want to see more pictures check out my slide show entitled "A Cat Quilt in Pictures". The pictures of the sleeping cat that is on our pillows as well as the five cats in the middle, the stretching cats at the bottom and the cats with the butterflies along the sides will all be there. I am blessed to have such good friends.