Cat Patch for Halloween...Gift...in March

 This is for a friend who likes Halloween

 

 

Patchwork Cat Jacket

About eight years ago, I made a patchwork blanket based on a quilt block idea I had about ten years ago.  I based the block on 4½" fabric squares.  Early last month, I wondered if I could figure out a version of the block based on the square die sizes I have for my die cutter.

I did a little sketching and math and arrived at cutting the squares at 35mm, the squares that would be cut into half square triangles at 40mm, and the squares that would be cut into quarter square triangles at 45mm.  Because I am not 100% committed to Perfect, I cut those squares into halves and quarters with scissors, so things were...variable...but workable.

The day I posted the previous project (still not happy with that), I cut enough squares and triangles to do a test, and made this 

Success!

Then the tedium started, eventually getting to this

 

 Eventually.

Quick Cat Kick

Years ago, I made a simple kick toy for my cats, and none of them had any interest in it.  I eventually realized that Neighborcat Tyler--this guy

had a very "grab and kick" play style, so I gave the kick toy to him, and he did very much play with it.

Until it disappeared off the front porch.  No clue what happened to it.  Possibly raccoon activity.

Cats in Space

 I got this cloth from Joann probably 8 years ago, at a time when the kiddo would still wear button up shirts and I had not yet realized that making something that complicated, that would be outgrown so quickly, was not an enjoyable application of my time.  So, I had several single yards of fabric he'd picked out for possible shirts, languishing in the fabric stash.  I destashed most of them earlier this year, but held on to a space cat print.

I  just finished using it to make a button up shirt for me.

On the one hand, I'm surprised I could eke out most of the pieces in me-size from a single yard with a "directional enough for me to want to treat as one way" print--I cut only two pieces from a contrast gingham.  On the other hand, the way I eked out some of it was, in retrospect, not optimal.

Eking out another skirt

 There was enough fabric left from making the cat patch jacket to make a matching miniskirt, using good ol' New Look 6843.

The process of making this was as straightforward as always, even though I once again added lining--in fact, that worked out better than usual.

Herding Cats

 The first try of McCall's 8121, complicated by a perhaps excessive amount of purpose-made cat appliqués, is finished

Yayyyy

Patch Notes Update

 Continuing on: eight more patches

Patch Notes

So.  The patches I mentioned in the previous post.  I am very much still working on making them.

I started with three (one of which I had made years before) and have made 17 more.  The photographing thereof is inconsistent (and not great quality), because it didn't occur to me that documenting the progress would be worthwhile, if only to show that I have been sewing.

Cool Cat

Another pair of Obnoxious Shorts™ for the kiddo!

I let him pick out several prints at JoAnn in the beginning of the summer, and I'm slowly making things from them--first the cash shirt, now...this

Yes, another Kwik Sew 2544--it goes up to kid size 14, so we should have a few more years of use out of it.  For now, I can still squeeze a pair of long shorts (longer than the pattern expects) out of  one yard of a directional print.

Barely.

 This print has a wide selvedge, and there's a bit of it visible on this pocket, although the other side

is fine.  Relatively.  I didn't have enough cloth to be able to be in any way selective about what cat landed where, so there's this really close repeat here.  (This is why I like to pattern match across center front seams when at all possible, just to avoid repeats like this.)  I folded a bit of width out of the pockets to get them to fit on the bits of cloth they were cut from, too.

Fortunately the print on either side of the fake fly front is not as annoying

There's one cat with a purple collar, so I decided to use purple thread.  Why not?

The same cat ended up accidentally almost pattern matching on one part of the back seam curve, too

so she's definitely the star.


The cuffs were serged--just to give me a reference for depth--and turned twice before being stitched

I thought they looked a bit long on him, but he didn't say anything,and they'll probably seem significantly shorter by the end of the school year.

(This was the only picture that wasn't a blur of movement.)  He has several shirts with realistic cat prints, so he should be able to get a lot of use out of these shorts!

(And I have a small amount of the cat print left...which is probably going to become some bit of alarmingly loud doll clothes, because that's what I do...)

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

More cat sewing

Although, this time, it's not sewing a cat as much as it's sewing with cat print cloth.

This cloth, from Seikodo's Barcode Cats range (which I figured out by searching on the selvedge information) (And, yes, that cat has a flip phone--there's a 2006 copyright date on that selvedge, too.)

I thrifted it in December, cut it out about a month ago (when everybody in the house was sick, yay) and sewed it today--which is a pretty fast purchase-to-finished-item turnaround for me...

Official UFOs

I finished the patchwork blanket top I'd wanted to work on before starting the cat patch experiment project

...and then I added a few more rows to the cat patch experiment project, doubling its size

This one is roughly 90" square, the first is roughly 60" x 90".  They'll be put aside until some unknown date when they'll get backs and batting and proper quilting.

I hope I can figure out how to take better pictures of 'em by then, too!

And there it shall stay

Here's where I've gotten with the experimental cat patch project

Not at all sure if I'll stop here (roughly 43" square) and finish it with the remaining piece of the watercolor-style floral for the back, or keep going until it's grown to bedspread size.  For now, it's been folded and put back into the cloth closet, making it my first official UFO in a long time...

Patch Cat

I saw Elizabeth Hartman's cat patchwork blocks and thought they were adorable but way too complicated for my sewing inclinations, so I played around in CorelDraw (hooray for snap to grid) and came up with this cat block idea

which I decided to try out today (instead of working on the other patchwork project I had ready to go...)

I showed it to the kiddo without telling him it was supposed to be a cat, and he gave it a hug and asked if he could have it, so I took that as a positive ID.  (After I made progress with this springtime palette, he asked of he could have something wilder...so...yeah...eventually...)

The only tweak I think I'll make is to flip one of the eye blocks so the patch arrangement is mirrored instead of identical (although it doesn't really matter.)  And eventually I'll make an entire proper patchwork top arranged something like this

Eventually.