Carleen and Tom

Carleen and Tom are a young English couple living in Australian. They're getting married soon. I used to work with Carlee and we had arranged to catch up for breakfast this morning. On Friday I suddenly thought I ought to organise a wedding gift. Hardly enough time to make a quilt (bwahaha - my quilts usually take years, not hours or days).

I started with a card. I've been aiming to make a card every day or so, to build up my "on-hand stock". It was nice to have an actual recipient in mind.

The card is 9x4 inches, and based on an idea in the "Cardmaker's Sketchbook" (I will post about it - it's a wonderful resource.) It is black card, with a strip of gold hearts on clear velum. The stickers are el-cheapos, trimmed and repositioned on cream card. The velum is partly attached by the two visible brads, and partly by tape under the stickers. Inside is a piece of silver paper for the message.

I asked my online quilting group, Quilting Down Under, for ideas for a personal wedding present. Someone mentioned cushions. I know Carleen & Tom have two beautiful Bengal cats and they're a bit cat mad, so I looked for suitable images for a matching pair of cat cushions. Instead I found a lovely abstract of two cats. As it was too long to go on a cushion, I changed directions and made a small wallhanging.

When I was finishing it I remembered I had a cat wire hanger. Not sure where it came from; might have been a swap. I've had a small hanging on it for years - my very first practice block of hand quilting. But, really, it's neither here nor there to me and it is perfect for my cat hanging.

The two cats are Australiana fabrics I've had in my stash, left-over from a quilt I made in Perth (over 12 years ago). The border squares are from my 2 inch scrap stash. The background and binding are plain black homespun.

The squares in the border are pink/red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple - there's three fabrics for each colour, two squares for each fabric (i.e. six squares of each colour). I was told years ago that the secret to any scrappy quilt is to repeat fabrics. Apparently, if you repeat fabrics you can basically get away with anything. Where possible I have chosen either Australiana or cat fabrics.

The cats are appliquéd with machine blanket stitch. I quilted in the ditch between the centre and the border, and shadow quilted about 1/4 inch from the edge of the cats. The whole thing is very approximately 20x10 inches.

I'm quite happy with the result.