The Big Kahuna!

The one big project I haven't posted about yet is my largest quilt ever - 102 x 102, designed for a king bed. The quilt is actually a commission for my friend. I don't do commissions - ever - but she told me she wanted something with cats on it and she was willing to go with literally anything I wanted. So I said sure! We mulled ideas for several months, I wasn't sure if it was going to really happen or not, and then I sent her this photo that I had seen on instagram.

Now I don't know why this Cat Lady quilt hasn't gotten more play on the interwebs, but it's totally adorable! And Free! So on Superbowl Sunday, we sat down and agreed to make this quilt happen.

My first step was deciding how to enlarge the pattern to king size. I scaled up the squares from 5" finished to 6" finished and added several rows.

To add some flavor I decided to randomly intersperse New York Beauty blocks throughout the top. NYB's are an item on my bucket list, so I could check them off by sneaking them in here. I figured it would work with the kitty bodies, which are basically modified NYB blocks themselves.

Now for color scheme, I tried a lot which I'm not going to bother showing you, until I came up with this one:

I really liked the ombre idea, and my friend was game, so I dove right in! After a lengthy shopping expedition, I ended up with the following array of fabrics:

Conveniently, they match my trash can ;)

I then proceeded to take over our bedroom floor, the only space big enough to hold this thing. Aaaand that space has been taken over for the past two month.

Pepper is modeling the current state of the quilt. The top is about halfway pieced. I went into several weeks of not working on it because I felt the colors were too disjointed. So I said what the heck and tossed several pieces of fabric into a vat of blue dye.

Drying the fabric out.

The before and after of my test dye batch. The actual dye batch came out a lot darker.

I really think dying the fabric helped a lot with the top - or maybe it's all in my head, but it got me going again. Here are some closeups of the various NYB's. There are little ones and big ones - for the big ones I am doing no two designs alike.

After some wonky blocks, I tried the "six minute circle" method, which you can see in the block on the left. The block on the right is traditional curved piecing. I decided that even though my curves have wibble wobbles, the traditional piecing looks better than the six minute circle method.

So that's where we are at today! I continue to chug along and I'm hopeful to have the top done by the end of May.