Oh, gaudy kitty quilt. I love you so so much. I am 99.9% sure that this is my favorite quilt that I've ever made, beating this quilt by only 1/10 of a percentage.
Background - We moved Phoebe into a twin size at the beginning of summer; hence, she needed a new big girl quilt for her big girl bed.
If you learned anything about Phoebe from her Rainbow Kitty Party, you know that this girl has a *bit* of an obsession with kitty cats. So I decided to take all of my kitty fabric - including the super gaudy novelty prints that had been in my stash for forever - and combine them all in a quilt that any 4 year old, cat-lovin girl would go nuts over. In turn, the Gaudy Kitty Quilt was born.
It took me quite awhile to figure out what kind of layout would be best for this crazy quilt. I didn't want to cut the fabric pieces too small since a lot of these novelty prints have a larger scale. Plus, I got into quilting because of all the amazing textile design, and I like to really showcase the prints in my quilts.
My good friend Rossie is the one who recommended this layout of equilateral triangles with the prints laid out in rows. I had just finished working on this poor quilt that was never blogged about, which was also made up entirely of triangles, and the last thing that I wanted to look at was MORE TRIANGLES, but I knew that it would be the way to go.
This was my original fabric pull. I have some other great cat prints in the stash, but once I started putting the majority of the fabrics together, the quilt's own color palette started developing, so I decided to remove the blues and most of the other darker toned prints. Yes it was being made with novelty cat fabric - but I wanted to at least try and make the final product pretty!
I didn't have enough kitty fabric to complete the entire top, so I started mixing in other things Phoebe likes - butterflies, bugs, birds, bunnies (apparently anything that starts with B), and some blender floral prints that I thought made the color scheme a bit more interesting. I'm proud of myself for even cutting into some of my preciously hoarded japanese fairytale prints.
After getting the top pieced, I made the decision to send out the quilt top to a professional long-armer to be quilted. I've always quilted my own quilts on my machine at home - even some much larger than this, but my friend Brenda put the idea into my head to have a design of cats quilted all over the top - which was pretty much the best idea I'd ever heard in my life.
Luckily I know Kathy though our Modern Quilt Guild who owns Thread Bear Quilting. Not only is she an amazing quilter, but she was able to quilt this design all over the gaudy kitty quilt.
And that brings us to the end of this quilty journey. Phoebe loves, and I mean LOVES her quilt, which makes this momma so darn happy. But even if she didn't, that would still be okay - because then I'd get to keep it for myself!
Meow!
**This quilt is part of the Blogger's Quilt Festival. Click here to be inspired by hundreds of beautiful quilts!
