Completed: A Surfin Cat Quilt

I made a £3 quilt!

I decided that this year I was going to try and make more quilts - and as there are only so many quilt related things that can fit in one house (or tiny flat)...I decided to make this for my brother's girlfriend's birthday. (That has passed now so I can share it :-D) I didn't really have a plan to start with however on an online shopping spree found this fat quarter from Trixie Lixie for around £3. This quilt makes up at around 96 cm x 64 cm so is by no means a standard size.

Having the fat quarter I decided to then fussy cut as many of the cats as I could to then frame them with another yet to be determined fabric! Cutting the cats was a bit awkward due to the pattern of the fabric and so they all ended up really weird, non uniform sizes. The border fabric was then taken from my Kim dress: I only bought 2m of fabric however there seemed to be loads left over at the end of the dress and so I managed to frame each of the squares with some of the fabric as well as using it for the sashing. I still have more left too!

I famed each of the cat blocks in a white cotton left over from my nested Churndash quilt. I added strips about two inches wide then squared the blocks up a bit - whereas I used my rotary cuter and ruler to cut up the initial fat quarter I was limited with the print of how straight each cut could be and after one or two that were squint there was no saving it :-( haha. So the white squares are mostly so I could achieve square squares...

I then made each of the smaller cat and white blocks larger by first adding a side border of the blue hemmingway print to make all the blocks in each column more or less equal in width (did I mention that I had no plan for this quilt...) The blue hemmingway fabric was then used for the sashing and the quilt was bound with the remains of the white fabric.

To make up the quilt I used some leftover warm and brite wadding from the nested churndash quilt (I think) and more of the remaining white fabric from this quilt too. I also pieced in a couple of the wonky blocks which never made the final cut for the front and slip stitched on the selvage information from the cat fat quarter to serve as a reminder for the fabric.

Quilting consisted of framing each of teh cats and their white windows, and then dropping teh feed dogs and taking the quilt for a wander - I have never tried free motion quilting before and to be honest I'm not sure that I will again for a long time. It's just not a technique that I'm really fond of.

I am really pleased with the results of this quilt and happy that I managed to use up so much of the remains of the materials bought for the nested churndash. Wadding seems to take up so much space and I am always happy when I can use it up and regain some wardrobe space!

Hopefully everyone had a great weekend and has had a relitively pain free monday so far... I'm invigilating this afternoon and as there are only a few students it's not so bad! I also hope everyone that is taking part in it is enjoying MMMay - I have certainly discovered a few things about my me mades!

Have a great week all!

JCS xx