Introducing Black Cats

Having mentioned my Around the World foundation pieced quilt I think it's time to introduce it to the world. A couple of years ago at the Sandown quilt show I found some charm packs consisting soley of cat fabrics (from The Contented Cat). I just had to buy them but then I had to find a use for them too... We had just done a foundation piecing course so I had some 1cm squared vilene lying around so I decided I was going to make a quilt out of 1cm log cabins. Conveniently 1" strips work out pretty well for the seam allowances so each 6" charm square yielded 6 strips - just enough to make 2 log cabin blocks. Of course the finished blocks are quite small (7cm square to be precise) so after some quick calculations I realised it would take about 420 blocks to make a double quilt... still, I find long projects very comforting to work on - the finish line is so far away that you can just enjoy the sewing and you don't really have to look at the big picture until way down the line!

Because the cat fabrics come in just about every colour under the sun I decided to use black as the background fabric - I started off with plain black but my Flying Safari quilt taught me that too much plain black is really boring to look at so I later widened the backing to include black-on-black prints which I hope will balance nicley with the patterned cats.

Anyway, I went back to my project bag today and checked on my progress - I appear to have in the region of 140 blocks finished so I'm about a third of the way there. I think this one's been sat in the cupboard for at least a couple of years now so it really is time I paid it some attention. I took a few piccys to remind me to work on it some more so here it is: Black Cats

One Block - See the ruler at the bottom for size!

16 blocks together - 28cm in total (just over 11")