Fat Cat Quilts

Falling for Grace

 
I. Love. This. Fabric.

 
You will too. Check it out.

Round Robin with a Side of Drama

 
Lots going on around here. This time of year is always a flutter of activity and awakening as Spring starts breaking her way through and Skagway wakes up from a long winter's nap. We've had a week of glorious sunshine. The days are getting longer every day, and bringing warmth with them. Today we got up to 46°, which would be considered winter for most, but for us, it was absolutely divine. Instead of trudging to the gym every day, we're taking our act outside. It's great to get the fresh air, and is an even greater opportunity to scope out what's going on around town. Like the big pile of bear poo on one of the docks. Bears are so rude. And apparently, early risers. It's only March. Still lots of snow on the mountains, but at least now, when the sun goes down in the evenings, we have that pink alpen glow. Hard to believe in just a couple months, the sun won't be going down at all. Even harder to believe that in a week, I'll be going back to work for the season. And just like that, another winter is gone.

 
I worked on my 3rd rotation in our Round Robin project this week. This one might be my favorite of the bunch. Although it's hard to tell. They've all been gorgeous. This one belongs to Trish, who owns the quilt shop in town. She went with a scrappy fall theme, which is totally out of her box. She started with the four-star block in the center. Look familiar? It's a block from a popular quilt in the Nickel Quilts book called All That Glitters. The next quilter set it on point and added the flying geese border. Then the person after that added the scrappy quarter-square triangle border, which then brought it to me as you see in the above picture. I wanted to bring the cream vine print from the center setting triangles back into the mix. So I set out making some star blocks for the corners.

 
And added them on with some of that great Kathy Schmitz vine print. And ended up with this:

 
It's definitely getting too large to have a helper hold up for photos. So I laid it out on my thread-strewn floor, which is always an open invitation for the monsters cats.

And speaking of cats, Tigger had some excitement this week, which quickly morphed into the day from Hell. He needed his teeth cleaned. Since we don't have a vet in Skagway, this means a trip to Whitehorse, two hours away. We love the doctors up there at the Alpine Veterinary Clinic, but just wish they were closer. Since we had an early appointment, we were up and on the road at 6:30 in the morning. 27 miles up the highway is Canadian Customs, and about a half mile before, the temperature gauge in our car spiked to the dangerous red zone and smoke started spewing out from under our hood. Never a good sign. So we pulled into Customs and they pulled us over and looked under our hood with us. Turns out the radiator cap had blown and antifreeze had sprayed all over the engine. Nice. But lucky for us, the cap had lodged itself near the battery and we didn't lose it along the highway. So Customs took us to their highway maintenance building and refilled us with antifreeze and we were back on the road. Thank you Canadian Customs. You saved the day!

We dropped off Tigger at the vet an hour late. Since Tigger is getting up there in years, they had to do blood tests first to see if his kidneys and liver were strong enough for anesthesia. He passed with flying colors on the kidneys, but x-rays showed big infections in his teeth and jawbone. Long story short: they needed to pull two teeth and do a root canal. This was going to be an all-day adventure. So leaving Tigger at the kitty dentist, we went off to shop and run errands. An hour later, I'm in Walmart with a loaded cart. I had everything on my list and was headed to check out and the power goes out. No emergency lights or anything in there. The place was pitch black. I Marco-Polo'd Keith until I found him and we headed up front where they made us abandon our carts and leave. Grrrr. Then I started getting nervous about Tigger being in surgery with no power and we headed back to the vet. Their offices were in the dark too, but they had generators for the two surgery rooms. Now to kill time until Tigger is done and we can go home. Except we need to gas up and all the gas stations are closed with the power outage. Whitehorse eventually saw electricity again, and Tigger has a mouth full of stitches and two less teeth, and we got gas, and all was well. It was a long day for sure.

I have one more round robin left to work on. It's a little Christmas wall quilt. And then I should be getting mine back soon. I am so excited to see it.

 

 

Fandango

I'm developing this little habit on blogging on Mondays. And ONLY Mondays. While my intentions are to blog more often, the reality of the matter is I'm just not sewing fast enough to have anything to share. Unless you want a play-by-play of my two-week mid-winter stint back in the ticket office to cover for someone on family leave, or a rivoting recount of the catnip mice I rescued from the couch cushions....Mondays are it.

 
I have 32 of my 64 Fandango blocks sewn together. I'm assembling things completely different than how the pattern calls. The pattern actually directs you to individually cut all four quadrants of each block, in addition to individual little inner strips. I don't understand why she has you do all the extra cutting and sewing. I'm just sewing my main components together, and then I'll assemble them in verticle rows and sub-sut the entire row and insert one long inner strip, rather than making each block on it's own. Does that make sense? It will go together much quicker and it's less chain sewing. It's a fun assortment of retro-brights in large prints and is certainly cheery. The dark color in the line is a plummy-brown color, so I'm using a dark eggplant for the stripes to really bring out the plum and less of the brown. Here's a recap of what the finished quilt will look like:

 
And just for fun, check out these cute boots I scored this weekend. I know, most of you are celebrating the onset of Spring, but we're still in boot-weather here in Alaska. And since Southeast Alaska is a rainforest climate, the truth of the matter is I'll get to wear them in Spring and Summer too. Won't they be cute outside in the rain, loading passengers on trains....oooh la la.

 
PS. Maybe I should use the black laces for work.