Okay, we quilters know that any quilt is the cat’s quilt if and whenever he wants it and can get to it to decorate it with his fur, but sometimes they do have their own quilts as well. Shadow has his up on top of the shelf unit that serves as my computer desk. It’s nice and warm up there, and he can see the world, or make plans to pounce on Patches when he comes in the room:

This particular quilt really is a cat quilt, since the pattern is pieced kitties and flowers. I made this years ago, way back in the beginning of the whole quilting addiction. It wasn’t always meant to be the cats’ quilt, but somehow along the way it became one. Our old kitty CB used it daily until she passed away, and then it sat in a bag for a bit until GuitarGirl would let me wash it. She was quite attached to CB, and was adamant that I not wash the quilt after CB went to kitty heaven. Now Shadow uses it almost daily.

I quilted it with some decorative machine stitches that were on my Pfaff 955 that I had back then. I had no clue what I was doing, and I couldn’t figure out how else to quilt it. The binding is a bit on the sad side (had no idea how to do that either at the time), and now it’s coming undone in the bargain. I’d take a picture of the actual quilt (once he gets done with his snooze), but it’s likely so covered with cat hair that it wouldn’t actually be worth it! I dug the pattern out of the closet and scanned the font of it:

Even back then, I couldn’t just make the pattern like it’s shown; I had to make things complicated and do a black background, and then some of the flowers were too dark, and I think that added to the whole “how do I quilt this” quandary. The pattern even had suggested quilting designs in it, but that was also before I knew how to free motion machine quilt, there were too many curves in the quilting patterns, and I wasn’t doing it by hand for sure!

Being the packrat that I am, I’m keeping the pattern around. It’s not available anymore as far as I can tell, and you never know when you might need something like this for whatever reason. (I use that reasoning for a LOT of things which is why my house is too small. Note that I don’t have too much stuff, it’s the house that’s too small!) I don’t think I’d ever make it again, but maybe one of my kids will someday. It doesn’t take up much space in the overall scheme of things.

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What do you do with sewing machine needles that have been used, but aren’t ready to be thrown away? If you have to change the needle for one of a different size, where do you put the one you take out of the machine? It’s best not to put it back in the package with the new needles, because then when you need a really “new new” one, you won’t know which ones are new and which ones have been used already.

Here’s the quick, easy and cheap fix:

Stick your slightly used needles into a tomato pincushion, which can be found almost anywhere for about $1.00, or you can get the extra large model for a bit more. You can make it even easier to re-use these needles at a later date if you mark the pincushion on the top with numbers using a pigma pen, so that you can organize the needles by size. Read the rest of this entry »

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I have quite a few quilts hanging on the walls in the stairwell of our house, and most of the time that works out fine, and looks pretty nice (way better than boring empty walls, in any case). Sometimes the cat decides to try to take them off the walls for me, but he hasn’t done that in a while so maybe he’s growing out of that particular quirk. (Just guess which cat does that!)

Then there are the times when the quilts get a little overly friendly and jump off the walls at people, which is what happened here, I’m sure.

This would be GuitarGirl stuck on the stairs with a quilt falling on her head, wooden hanging rods and all. Sometimes it’s just not her day. The quilt couldn’t possibly have fallen because GuitarGirl twitched it with the guitar case as she was going up, no sirree. *snicker* It was kind of her to “hang out” while I got the camera!

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