Reflections on the Cats NotQuilt: A Long Time in the Wash.

This post is part of a series about sewing NotQuilts. If you’re unfamiliar with this method, The NotQuilt series begins here.

This link takes you to the Cats, Cats, and More Cats Notquilt project.

The cat NotQuilt is washed and ready to be evaluated. Did it succeed?

As a functional piece of bedding, well, yes. ‘Cats, cats, and more cats’ makes the grade. It’s warm, heavy, repairable, and it didn’t cost me a penny other than for electricity for the sewing machine, the iron, and lighting. My expenditures were my time and using up fabric from the stash that had to be used for something. So why not this?

The design aesthetic is harder to measure. ‘Cats, Cats, and more Cats’ is, at first glance, very random in its layout and appearance.

As it turned out, my stash of cat patterned fabric all turned out to be in the brown to yellow to green to blue color range. There were no aggressive reds or shouty purples demanding attention and fighting it out with the other fabrics for dominance. Now I like aggressive reds and shouty purples but there’s already enough fighting going on here with all those cats.

Since the cat patterned fabric was fortuitously limited in its color palette — if the viewer doesn’t look closely at squabbling cats – from a distance, the NotQuilt reads as a sea of harmonious blues, greens, tans, and browns, punctuated with an occasional spot of yellow. Using solid green in various shades to fill in the spaces between the patterned cloth adds to the sense of control and uniformity across the NotQuilt top. Those solid greens, despite their own variety, blend in and give the eye a place to rest. The green rectangles frame the sea of cat patterned cloth. They also tie in nicely with the hunter-green binding and its seafoam green center blocks.

I did a decent job of spacing out the blue background cat fabric; there aren’t any bunchy spots where its all blue and other spots where blue is obviously missing. The most strongly patterned cat fabrics are likewise well spaced out across the NotQuilt face.

The two green background cat fabrics worked out fairly well too. They don’t touch each other, they separate the other cats, and the darker green background with cat heads is always placed right-side-up, bringing in at least some sense of order.

But none of those design elements are enough. This NotQuilt is, despite the controlled theme (cats) and the limited color palette, chaotic.

This was a fixable design problem back at the very beginning. If you recall, I started out with the ugly, dull, rose-pink comforter. It already had squares, some of them quite large, of cat-patterned fabric sewn to cover rips and tears. The cat fabric set the tone and I’m still fine with that decision.

What I am not fine with was my decision to save time at the very beginning. I only ripped and resewed the patches that were within a few inches of the comforter’s edges and only the patches that overlapped.

I should have removed them all and started with a blank slate.

I have no idea how the finished design would have turned out. Would I have laid out some kind of background set using the green background cat fabrics? Perhaps all the dark-green cat heads running up and down and the paler green kittens running horizontally? Or the other way around? Then sewn the remaining cat patterned fabric around as needed, breaking up some of the very large squares?

I keep noticing how very large some of the squares are, how they fill and dominate their sections of the NotQuilt. Would it have looked better if those pieces of fabric had been ripped into smaller rectangles?

I do know, for sure, that if I had removed every last sewn down piece and started with a blank slate, I would have made certain I got a wider area for the border between the binding and the center area. A wider border always looks better than a skinnier one.

But would that have worked? I was very limited in the amount of solid green I had available. As I sewed ‘Cats’, I kept running out of one shade of green and had to search the stash for another. I might have ended up using a wider array of greens than what appears now, in the finished NotQuilt. Would that have looked better? Worse? Or just different?

There’s no way to know.

One of the problems with designing on the fly is that you don’t know what your finished product will end up as. You may not like what you get. The project will fight you, wanting to become what it becomes, based on the raw materials available. Self-imposed parameters such as using only material from the stash and not buying more cloth force their own design decisions.

So it is with ‘Cats, Cats, and More Cats’. At every step of the process, my self-imposed limitations determined where I ended up. There were pre-existing patches, patterned with cats. I didn’t want to spend hours of my time ripping all of them off. I removed a few patches, that is true, but only those that were obviously going to cause problems. I didn’t want any of my cat material to touch, if you recall.

I also didn’t want to buy more fabric. Buying a few yards of cat patterned fabric would have made the NotQuilt go together a lot more easily. Yet, I have so much fabric hanging around, filling a wall of Rubbermaid storage bins. My dear husband will tell you quite emphatically that I do not need any more cloth. He is right and if I want to practice what I preach about thrift, then I had better be thrifty and use what I’ve already got.

So here we are. ‘Cats, Cats, and More Cats’ works well for its intended purpose. It’s warm, it’s washable, it’s finished, and it didn’t cost me anything but time. It allowed me to repurpose an otherwise unusable comforter and empty out some of the stash. Younger Son, who is the person using ‘Cats’, likes it just fine. He’s happy.

I should be happy too. I did what I set out to do and I did the best I could within the limitations on this project. I’m the only person who will look at ‘Cats’ and think, ‘it could have been better’. No one else will ever notice. They’ll see a busy, exuberant celebration of cats.

What I see, every time I look at ‘Cats’, is that I should have spent the time and ripped off every one of those original patches and started with a blank comforter. But that’s the chance I take when I design on the fly and let the NotQuilt tell me what to do next. That’s the risk inherent in using only the materials I already have on hand. That’s the restriction imposed by not wanting to put in still more time and effort that may not make a difference in the end product anyway. I may not adore my finished project.

I have to remind myself that my finished NotQuilt does what it is supposed to do. I am not making a quilt that will win first prize at the county fair or tour the country in quilt shows or be written up in a quilting magazine cover story.

I am making a utility quilt that keeps Younger Son warm.

So I step back and look at ‘Cats’ and say, “it’s alright. It worked out as well as can be expected, perhaps better. I like it. I don’t love it. But I do like it.”