Pets on Quilts 2017 - Cats with ATTITUDE on quilts (entry 2)

"You may NOT take this quilt!"

Isabeau is a funny girl. She's a ragdoll kitty, but she was born with a crooked eye, so she's super neurotic and won't let anyone touch her. Or even look at her. 

But boy, does she love this quilt. (Good thing for her, it's Scott's and lives here at the house.) Any time it is laying out she wants on it. (This quilt's story was posted here.)

Clara wanted on it, too, but was only allowed to squeeze onto an edge.

Navarre, for once, left off with pestering Isabeau about something she wanted to claim, and he waited for the next priority project.

"Why are there only DOGS? Where are the MEs?"

Although, guess who decided she wanted this quilt, too?!

(That quilt was featured in my other Pets on Quilts entry, posted here.)

~*~*~

Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

This awesome show's link-up is open through the weekend, so there's still time for you to make an entry or two~!

Pets On Quilts 2017 - "Lori & Aliya" (entry 1)

Pets on Quilts is one of my all-time favorite quilt shows!  
I'm entering this quilt into the "Pet-themed Quilted Project" category

And it gives me the perfect opportunity to put together an overdue Finish Report for one of my absolute favorite quilts:

"Lori & Aliya"

This quilt, after washing and blocking, measures 55 x 55 inches.

It has all-cotton top fabrics, a Minky back, and Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting. Everything was prewashed, including the batting, to minimize shrinkage. I re-engineered the construction of Jenny Pedigo's "Metro Hoop" pattern to produce an unpieced ring center for the cameos.

I finished this quilt about 5 weeks ago. It has been a long labor of love for a super good friend from our Florida days. The top was made in 2014, and for various reasons on both ends, it got put on standby a few times. This year when it entered the priority queue, it took many weeks of intense free-motion work to get it all quilted up on my domestic Viking Sapphire. 

I'm in Colorado now, and Lori's in Kentucky. But while we were still in Florida, Lori and I enjoyed tea and dinner and a DVD together at my place every Thursday night after she got off work.

Lori commissioned this quilt to feature cameos of her super-duper awesome canine bestie, Aliya. I like the way this filter choice showcases the portraits: 

I worked hard to develop quilting templates from favorite photos that would reflect her pretty German Shepherd-ness and hopefully capture her personality while working effectively with the way quilting makes fabric puff and flatten. (That process was blogged here.)

 

Lots of detail work happened in those cameos! I can't tell you how many hours were spent tying and tucking tails! It took many sessions of watching movies, that I distinctly remember.

When I asked Lori what kind of quilting she wanted other than the cameos, she said she wanted traditional feathers, bones, and dog paws. My quilter brain was reeling - "Waaa!!  How on EARTH can you put all that together on a modern ring design and have a semblance of cohesiveness?"

But you know how your brain works away at things in the background, and then you wake up at 2:30 am with an "Aha!" moment? Yeah, that happened with this quilt, and when I pulled out my plexiglass oversheet to be able to doodle on top of the quilt, some play time with dry-erase markers teased out the design that would work.

I can quilt a lot prettier than I can draw! Go figure.

And the execution of the idea was a huge success. 

I love so much how Minky backing showcases quilting work:

Wait, I said earlier that this was all free-motion work, but I did use my walking foot to stabilize the whole quilt with stitch-in-ditch and echo lines around the arcs before I started the real work.

I used Aurifil 50wt threads in matching colors everywhere, except the portraits got a subtly variegated King Tut 40wt to stand out, and the paws got a gray contrast Aurifil. (Note: cotton threads can be problematic with Minky backings, as it sometimes grasps the "fur" and pulls fibers through to the front a bit. This will show when the thread is a different color from the Minky. In future I'll stick with slicker fibers for this backing.)

Stitching the binding down on this quilt was a little interesting, as my stitching hand was in an immobilizer due to a bit of a boxer's break that I got when I did a knife hand power break incorrectly while practicing for a Taekwondo tournament.

Aliya loves cats, which is good, because my boy Navarre loved this quilt, and I didn't have to confine myself always to the only room that is cat free.

My kitty was very helpful during some of the prep stages, offering paw marking aid. . . 

(No, Navarre, we're using Aliya's paw!)

. . . and suggesting I include his adorable otter pose in the design. . .

. . . REALLY suggesting I use that pose. . . 

He's a constant photo bomber on indoor shots, my funny little friend (as you can see here with one of my Fiesta Mexico blocks).

Poor boy cries and cries at the screen door now that I have a longarm in its own room that's kept cat-free, but that's for another post of its own.  :D

"Lori & Aliya" was the last quilt to be finished on my domestic machine, which adds to its specialness for me. Thanks for letting me share it in a special venue.

The show link-up is active for a couple more days, so you have time to get a post together if you want to participate this year. 

Huge thanks to Snoodles at Lily Pad Quilting for coordinating this every year. I know it has to be an enormous amount of work.

~*~*~

Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

TGIFF at A Quarter Inch from the Edge

2013 Pets on Quilts Show - Dear Jane and Selma

It's time for the annual Pets on Quilts show!!  I love this one! 

Selma would like to show you the current state of my Dear Jane assembly.

Lookee!

Two more spacer strips and then I can attach the triangle borders and the scallop edging strips.

Truth be told, she doesn't like this one. Normally I have to keep them off quilts, but this time . . . we had to coax and beg and wait for the CATTITUDE to give way! What a riot.

A lot of patience, a 3-person photo-op team - and we finally got the sweet faces we usually see when one of the felines sneaks onto a quilt-in-progress laid out on the floor.  :D

Our Cats' Quilt Penchants - Pets on Quilts Show 2011

I’m bummed that this week is the single most difficult week in the year for me to get to my computer, because I’ve *really* been looking forward to following all the posts in the 2011 Pets On Quilts Show over at SewCalGal’s!  I’ll be snatching moments here and there as I can, but those will be few and far between as we drive 1700 miles EACH WAY to take Devon out to college. (Why do they have to go so far away??)

In the meantime, though, I wanted to share some fun shots I have of our cats this past year, as pertains to my quilts. We have way too many cats for one house, but there are times when that is really very interesting. For example, if we didn’t have so many felines, I never would have found out that each kitty has his or her own color preferences! (Don’t believe anything that says cats are colorblind – it’s obviously not true.)

Boo Girl doesn’t really pay much attention to the quilting going on (which is weird, because we all know how much cats usually love to lay on fabric, patterns, cutting mats, etc.).  But when I was working on these Geese On the Pond blocks with the greens, she had to be on or by them the whole time they were out. Does she like the green because it makes her eyes pop?  (That’s still a UFO, btw.)

Koko (short for Kao Ko Kung) is my blue baby. He doesn’t go for the fabric piles, but he loves to sit cuddled next to me, so he’s right there for just about every binding or label that I stitch. 

When I was doing the binding on Heather’s graduation quilt last summer, I could swear he’d purposefully kept my spot for me when I got up to go get a drink!

 While he always wants to be by me, other than that time of marking my place, he could be relied on to leave the project alone. 

(I almost didn't put that pic up - me in all my get-up-and-go-straight-to-the-sewing-machine glory. ick!)

UNTIL this next one one came out. 

When I plopped the sailboats and mariner’s star on my “design floor,” he suddenly flew over and stretched himself out across them. He kept trying to cover as many as possible. I’d wrestle them out from under him so I could rearrange them, then go off somewhere and he’d relax. As soon as I’d walk back toward them to get a look, he’d throw himself down on them again!

And when I auditioned the various blues for that project (you can see the finished quilt at this post), he went nuts, laying on the fabrics so pestily and getting angry when I’d move him or them. Every time I had that top out he had to come lay on it. And when I got it back from the longarmer’s, he went ape with excitement. You should have seen how ANGRY he got when I wouldn't let him sit on it while I was binding it and adding the embellishments. (But I couldn't have cat hairs all over it!)  Pretty funny.  Everything since then has seen more of the former “yeah, ok, you’re working on something” attitude. 

Except. . . we were working on tucking tails for this quilt full of the pretty blues he likes. Can you see him all burrowed in there?

And one last shot of his preference for blue - Does he like that color so much because he's got those gorgeous sapphire blue eyes that you sometimes find on a Siamese?

Marco is a typical cat - you ca't keep him from laying on any pile of fabric he can find to lay on. He’d be in heaven if someone would leave a pile of fabric out just for him to make a nest in. But the quilts themselves – he doesn't really care for. 

(Although, put a piece of paper on one and he'll brave even pins to sit on that!) 

But when this one came along from Em at Em Cellebrates! and I draped it over the sofa, that funny cat couldn’t go away from it. He laid on the sofa next to it, talking, talking, talking up a storm to it for DAYS! 

It was the funniest thing. I still wish I knew what that cat was saying to that quilt!

Selma obliged me by sitting on this wheelchair quilt for me, but it was clear she was performing a task. What I don’t have a picture of, unfortunately, is the quilts that she went wild over. 

This gorgeous calico mama goes crazy for purple (she doesn't care about pink). Or maybe it was the neon colors interspersed in these tornado relief quilts. 

Oh, look! I do have one shot of a cat that I sewed in a quilt! (well, a block, anyway)

Cats and quilts – they just go together so well, don’t you think?