Kittygons Complete

Day 236: The Kittygons quilt is done, except for sewing my "made by" label to the back! Finished dimensions are 78" x 60". I started this project on July 4, 2022, and was well into the hand-quilting of it when my dear little Tippy passed away. It went on hold when Merry moved in, and stayed in the cupboard until a month or so ago when I decided it was time to finish it up. I had not yet applied the binding, and since Merry kept trying to eat the fuzzy polyester batting, I bound it slightly ahead of schedule. Normally, I would have waited until I had quilted it out to the edge, but I only had a few "flowers" and the border hexagons to go, so I pinned the "flower" centers, and stretched the quilt, basting the top to the backing and batting. Then I put the bias tape around the edge, hoping that I wouldn't have any wrinkles or folds in the muslin back. This morning, I put the final quilting stitches in place. Now I can devote myself to the second "quilt-as-you-go" hexagon project already in progress.

Kittygons Almost Done

Day 233: The Kittygons quilt is almost done! All that remains is the outer row of partial hexagons along one edge and a few on the side I'm currently stitching. The back side shows the stitching best. Each dark green center has a "daisy" in the middle, and hidden in the hexagons somewhere, there is also a bee (not shown in the image). I like hiding surprises in my quilts! There were a few issues along the way with this one, notably that my sewing machine began acting up when I was about halfway done with the piecing (now fixed), so some of the seams weren't stitched firmly. As I've quilted each hexagon, I've fixed the loose bits by hand. Note that this was made as a machine-sewn quilt top, then batted and backed with muslin before I put it on the quilting frame (as opposed to "quilt-as-you-go" where each block or piece is made and finished individually). Merry has already decided it's his.

Picking Up

Day 221: "VARMINT!" I heard the sound of binder clip jaws snapping together, followed by a jarring thunk. I knew exactly what had happened, and worse, I knew it was going to happen as soon as I stepped out of the room, and I did it anyway.

I was within a month of finishing the Kitty Hexagon Quilt when Tippy left me, and I wisely put it away before inviting a tiny two-pound kitten into my home. I knew the temptation would be irresistible, and I didn't want our relationship to begin with harsh words. Picking up where I had left off, I finished sewing on the binding in the morning yesterday, and was ready to start quilting the last of the motifs. I brought out the Q-frame and mounted the quilt in it, one edge held by binder clips so that I could quilt close to the binding. I'd sewn two hexagons and several of the partial ones along the edge by dinnertime. I had not been in the kitchen five minutes when I heard, "Snap! Snap! Snap! Snap! THUD!!!" The little "tea-cup" cat now weighs almost 16 pounds, way more avoirdupois than any binder clip could be expected to support, and he'd decided to use the quilt as a trampoline.

Now I am resigned to unmounting the quilt at the end of each sewing session, leaving the Q-frame bare to its bones. Loaded, it's too wide to pass through the doorway into either bedroom where I could lock it safely away. Life With Cat is never, ever dull. Noisy, but never dull.

Kittygons Halfway

Day 306: Sooner or later, it happens to every person who quilts as much as I do. Your attention falters, and you sew something where it didn't belong. In this case, I was so excited about being halfway done with assembling the Kittygons that I sewed four extra background pieces into the spots which should have been reserved for the tops of the next set of large hexagons. I realized it only when I tried to fit a completed Kittygon into the nex row. A few swear-words later, all was set to rights and I was on my way to completion of Row 4. I have found that by having the Kittygons pre-assembled, it is much less confusing than trying to keep track of the order in which they appear if sewn in individual lines, but even so, it's obviously no guarantee against error. Hexagon quilts are fun to make, but anyone considering one should be prepared to sew a lot of short seams, and to waste an incredible amount of thread. There is no gang-processing here, no strings of pieces to zip through the sewing machine without cutting the thread. Every seam (two inches in this rendition) must be individually sewed. Be sure to put "patience" on your shopping list.

Kittygons Coming Together

Day 298: Although I'm still 100 shy of having cut all the lime green background pieces, I've begun assembling the kittygons after spending most of an hour yesterday with all of them laid out on the floor. My goal was to have no two identical small hexagons in proximity to one another, no two prints appearing in the same position near each other, and to prevent "clumping" of the same print, i.e., to place them in a fairly even distribution throughout the quilt. That was a pretty tall order, and I'm not sure I filled it to the letter, but that's what scrap quilts are about: randomness. One cannot achieve randomness by making it conform to rules because enforced randomness is not truly random by its very definition. I'm sure some day when I'm curled up under the Kittygons during a power outage, I'll find order somewhere in the chaos. I will undoubtedly cuss a vividly blue streak before I laugh and say to myself, "How on earth did I miss that?"

Kittygons

Day 264: After making two cat-themed "Cathedral Window" quilts, I still had a lot of feline prints left over. Since I enjoyed making a Hexagon Quilt so much, I decided to make one using "kittygons." One of the prints was rather large, so I used it to determine the size to which the hexagons needed to be cut to best display the cats. These larger prints need to be "fussy-cut," i.e., carefully centered on the desired image, so I've begun with them to get the hard part out of the way first. Cutting the smaller prints can be more casual. I was struck by how much the focal piece in this image resembled Skunk when she was just a little babycat ("babycat" is one word, people...don't argue with me), so it will have a place of honour in the finished quilt, and yes, I plan to keep this one. The layout requires 192 print hexagons, 32 solid-colour centers and enough background hexagons to sink the Titanic. I haven't chosen fabrics for the background, centers or border yet, but it will be backed with white muslin.