Fabric for the Cat Quilt

This post is part of a series about sewing NotQuilts. If you’re unfamiliar with this method, The NotQuilt series begins here. The link below takes you to the Cat Notquilt project.

At this point, I have only a few pinned pieces of fabric left to sew down and then I move on to sewing down the green set fabrics. I have been able to keep all of my different fabrics from being placed next to each other. There are four blue cat fabrics and they came out fairly evenly spaced across the surface of the NotQuilt. Their color will coordinate well with both green set fabrics.

Some of the pieces, particularly the deep blue flying cat patches are not rectangles. I will compensate for this by filling in the odd shapes with the green kittens, forcing them into a more rectangular shape. Or, I will sew down patches of green kittens that stretch across the gap from the oddly shaped deep blue flying cats to whatever is next to it.

I haven’t decided yet. The difficulty in shaping, ironing, pinning and sewing the bridge pieces will determine what actually happens. Decisions based on theory will take you only so far.

I also have to decide if I am going to work my way from the center outwards or from the edges inwards with the two green cat fabrics. This matters as it is much easier to sew from the center out to the edges. As the NotQuilt gets heavier and bulkier, I like working more and more on the edges and the weight is easier to manage.

On the other hand, if I start in the center, then the seam margins build up towards the edges as more and more pieces overlap. This creates a very subtle concave appearance to the patches: that is, they are lowest in the center and higher to the edges. I think it looks better for the overall layering of the patches to be highest in the middle and lower at the edges.

The other decision is how I will handle the two green cat fabrics. Will I make the horizontal sets kittens and the vertical sets striped cat heads? That is the way the second fabric wants to run. The darker green, with its stripes and cat heads, has a definite one-way orientation. The lighter green kittens could be sewn down in any orientation.

I do not have enough of either fabric to use it alone so I must make a choice.

One possibility is to use the lighter kittens in the center and the darker cat head stripes at the edges, cutting the second fabric so that the stripes always run vertically to keep the cat heads right side up, no matter what the orientation of the set piece is.

The other possibility is to alternate the set pieces so that I never touch two patches that match. This will not necessarily mean that the kittens go one way and the dark cat head stripes go the other; the pre-existing cat fabric patches are sewn on so randomly. There are a lot of gaps and I will have to do a lot of patching to bridge those gaps.

I’ll find out as I go.

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