Saturday afternoon I  drove up to Saint Joseph, Missouri and dropped the cat quilt off with David Hurd of Quilting by David. Earlier in the week I emailed him to see if there was enough time to get the quilt turned around by April 17th and he assured me there was.  When I dropped it off, he offered to meet me at a local quilt guild meeting on the 12th.  Wow — that would give me the weekend to finish the quilt and get it on the bed before our guests arrive on the 18th.  Then Tuesday morning I saw this (the date stamp is wrong):

An email and phone call confirmed that my quilt was ready and I could pick it up that evening.

It was in a bag with my name on it, and of course his logo and phone #.

I picked the edge to edge design Splat and a lavender thread for the quilting.  100% cotton batting was used.

I thought I had 2 weeks so the plan was to make a couple of pillowcases and the binding.  I found 2 yards of Tossed Cats while looking for a missing pattern in the disaster that is my sewing room. It was perfect for the cases.

Last night I finished making the binding. I’m using Susie’s Magic Binding so I hope to have the quilt finished in the next day or two. There’s no need to rush – the weather is going to be nasty over the weekend so I won’t be able to take pictures until sometime next week – if I’m lucky.  The calendar may say “Spring” and “April” but we had a record low yesterday (17 degrees) and are expecting snow and sleet over the weekend.

Warning. This post is photo heavy.

I’m having issues getting the photo of the quilt top with borders off my phone. So, here’s a pic of it before I added the borders. It took up the entire design wall.  At this point it measures 62″ x 80″. The borders added another 15 inches to the width and length.

Now for close ups of the sections. — Colors are off, I was doing this late a night under my dining room light.

“Row 1”

“Row 2”

“Row 3”

“Row 4”

“Row 5”

“Row 6”

I’m not quilting this one myself. I took it to the quilter on Saturday afternoon and he says he’ll have it back to me by the 12th.  That will give me plenty of time to finish it by my deadline of the 17th. While I’m waiting, I’ll make the pillowcases and binding. Yesterday while digging in my room looking for my next pattern I found 2 yards of Tossed Cats (the cats in the lime green stars). I might have used that for the border if I had remembered I  had it, but instead I’ll use it for the body of the pillowcases.  For the cuff I’ll use the border fabric.

I  need to pick up the pace if I plan to have this top finished by Friday. Essentially two rows are completed.  The third row is a work in progress.

Tonight I finished one row of the cat quilt. It’s a funky size 16 3/4″ finished. That’s due to those black and bright 4-patches set on point. Hopefully other sections will have a nice round length.

The black and bright 4-patches were left over from Eye Fooler.  The yellow and paw print blocks were bounce pieced from a sample block, which will probably end up in this quilt and the black and white squares, well, I’m not sure what they are from. They were in a couple of strip sets which I cut down. The bird is from the border fabric from a BOM I cobbled together years ago.

While I was at it, I make a new block for the quilt from my hoarded cat FQs.

Now on to the next section.

No, I have not finished On Ringo Lake.  I’ve got a deadline!  Which is probably my number one reason for most of my UFOs. I either set something aside to work on a deadline project, or the (soft deadline) passes and I didn’t get the project done, so it’s set aside to work on the next project.

The deadline is mid-April. This quilt is going to be a mix of two different panels — Cool Cats, which I’ve made a dozen bright stars with lime green backgrounds and Caterwauling which I’ve simply cut from the panels.  But if I did my math right, that only accounts for about half of the quilt top.

So, I’ve gone through my orphan block box, pulling blocks and pieces which I think will work (in the foreground). So far I have bonus HST units from Carolina Christmas (pink and white), a practice star for a table topper I made a few years ago (the stars in the topper were 1/2 inch larger), leftover pieces from Fireworks Over John Deere, and Gift Wrapped. I can’t remember where the purple and white HST came from, but I suspect they were bonus  HST as well.

Nothing like designing a quilt on the fly.