Finish it up Friday: Kittens Quilt

 In February, an important project sneaked into my list of projects.  A sweet girl in my church has been battling cancer and I offered to make her a quilt.  Her mom told me she loves cats, which was a pretty easy directive for me and my stash!

I made a "solids version" of the Kittens Quilt, pattern by Elizabeth Hartman.  I really debated trying to make the kitten face version of the pattern (much more detailed with eyes and nose), but I felt it was important to make this quilt fast for the recipient.  Of course, I didn't use solids, but found lots of kitty themed fabrics and blenders in my stash and framed them in this berry colored solid.  My daughter Charlotte loves cats, so pulling these fabrics together wasn't too difficult.  If it had been any other animal, I probably would've had to go shopping!

Before the FRMQG retreat I cut all of the pieces, and on the Friday night of the retreat (at 2 AM, so I guess it was technically Saturday), the top was completed.

I was very unsure of how to quilt this quilt.   The dark purple sashing and the much lighter colored fabrics seemed to require lots of different colored threads... I didn't think I would have the patience for that.  I leaned towards trying an "invisible" (monofilament) thread but my LQS was out of stock.  I took a look at their variegated Sulky selection and chose a thread that had the colors of plum, cream, gray, and a mustard yellow: perfect!

During the first night of quilting this quilt on my domestic machine, I ran into some really bad tension problems.  I spent almost an hour ripping out some bad quilting and then went to bed.  The next day, I researched quilting tension issues and found that my needle tension really needed to be raised: up to a seven (!), whereas my normal tension is set at a 4.  This is resulted in some upper thread breakages occasionally, but it didn't happen often enough to make me want to give up.

Here's some close up pictures of some of my favorite prints I included in this quilt:

For the backing, I dug out some serious stash lurkers: the white on yellow polka dot was meant to be a bag lining but I ended up finding a different print I liked better.  You can see there are two kitten blocks: this was because I accidentally made two extra blocks and didn't want them languishing in my orphan block pile for forever.

The print to the right is a quirky Michael Miller fabric I've had for about a decade (one of my first Marden's finds)!  Isn't it perfect for this quilt!?

I bound the quilt in a Patty Young stripe.

 It feels good to start and finish a quilt so quickly.  I had a lot of fun making it and I hope the recipient enjoys it and will find some comfort in it.

Linking up to Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts.