Monday, February 19, 2018

Meows

I wanted to combine some cotton prints that people had sent me--my usual vehicle for that sort of thing is in doll clothes, but there were larger amounts of these, so my brain said "Hey how 'bout some patchwork?"  And then it said "Not the usual complete randomness pulled from the scrap bin, either--let's try some proper blocks!"  followed by "And it'll be the cat face block you made up a while ago!  Only lots of 'em this time!" (There's a caveat here that it's very likely that this block already exists and I just haven't seen it elsewhere, because it's pretty logical.)

So I made up 16 of those blocks, but didn't sew on the lower corner pieces until the whole thing had been laid out and I figured out which non-block prints would be between each of them, and I laid them out so they were offset from each other in each vertical row.  Then I sewed on the lower corners and proceeded to sew the completed blocks to the appropriate prints.

Like this!

The whole thing ended up being about 36" x 54", so I added enough to the edges to make it about twin size.

Like this!

I chose that particular star block for the corners because it used the same "half triangle + quarter triangle of the same color + contrast quarter triangle" shape that makes up the cat eyes and nose sub-assemblies.  The gray floral used for the cat faces was used again in the border because I have so much of it, and the green check floral was used because it had been in a grab bag I'd thrifted (solely because the grab bag had 14(!) feedsacks in it) and I wanted to use all of this print up (I came close, but at least  the small amount left fits easily into the doll cloth dresser.  Have I mentioned that my 'big pieces of cloth' cloth shelf kinda broke a bit?  So 'storing less cloth there' is something of a priority right now...)

The kiddo claimed this for himself while I was laying out the cat faces on the kitchen table (he declared it to be lit) so it's fine that there are design decisions that bother me now--I want to make a template for a single piece to replace the triangle-square-triangle bits that go between the ears and eyes, and then I want to use that in the blocks at the tops of the rows that use the plain piece to offset the cats (sorry, I can't think of a way to phrase that better right now), and I also want to add ear triangles to the plain offset blocks on the bottoms of the rows.  I probably won't bother with batting and quilting--the kiddo doesn't lack for fluffy patchwork blankets, so a 'good for summer' thinner blanket will be just fine!

...if I ever actually finish it...

(and of course this happened)

Oh!  And!  I did make a doll dress from the two prints that started all of this



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