"Where Are The Cats".....2003

This is a favorite quilt of mine and it hangs in our entryway, which makes it hard to take pictures of. I had a few good ones from before it was hung and managed a couple more by standing halfway up the stairs.I had this "brainstorm" to make a quilt using all cat blocks, but to make them in colors so that they formed a picture of a cat sitting under a tree with fall leaves. It was fun to work on and another part of it was to "hide" 5 of my cats in it.....well the black cat isn't really hidden since he is suppose to look like a cat!
I'm not going to try to measure it but you can sort of tell the size here.

I need to splice these two pictures :-)

I machine quilted it and this was only my second attempt to machine quilt anything! I had no idea how to do the free-motion quilting except what I had read and seen on TV. I had an old sewing macine that you can't drop the feed dogs on which made it harder! My thread broke constantly, but I persevered and managed to do more or less what I wanted. I quilted poplar leaves (we always said they looked like cat heads) into the leaf areas, clouds (including a couple of cat shaped ones) in the sky area, and grass blades in the grass area.

I tried to photograph the kitty cloud :-)

I made this label for the back and wrote a poem that reads:

I see cats in the clouds,

I see cats in the trees,

But where are MY cats?

They're hiding from me!

For Whiskers, Hopey, Ozma, Nero and Mouse.

All of the "real cats" have eyes and hand stitched tails and mouths and noses.

This is Hopey and Ozma forming the branches of the tree.

I had to include Ozma's patchy throat to look like her :-)

Nero, was their brother who died of feline leukemia.

Whiskers was a lovely much-loved orange cat who died of cancer. He was easy to hide among the leaves.

Mouse....who we still have, lurking in the grass...which is pretty appropriate for her evil desire to attack feet.

I realized later that every quilt I did early on had embellishments on it and I seem to continue to make embellished quilts. I added the buttons to give the real cats their eyes, but then added more to help camouflage them by putting buttons on the fake cats.