Rainbow Cats and Binding Struggles

I write to you tonight from my cozy couch, the announcer’s voice from the high school football game down the street reaching me like an echoey message from God. I’m cozy, enjoying my solitude, but still feel connected to the outside world.

The project I bring to you today began with this fabric:

I bought it when I was a brand-new, naive quilter (aka last summer), and I didn’t know how much fabric I needed to complete a project. It was my pillow sham phase (which I guess never really ended), and I bought at least a yard of each of these fabrics to make a pillow sham for my good friend. When I saw this fabric, I knew it was meant to be.

Fast forward to today, when that pillow case is where it belongs and well-loved, and I still have a very large amount of this weird cat fabric left over. I’ve been looking for a good place to put it to use for a while now. So, when I heard the call for donations to the silent auction at work, benefiting United Way, I saw an opportunity to make a set of silly potholders to brighten up someone’s kitchen. Hopefully the people at work appreciate these wacky cats; and if not, I’ll just send them along to my friend, to match her pillow sham.

I knew I wanted to frame up the cats, so I some strips of fabric, 8.5″ in length and the width of the cat strip.

I’ll save the black stripes in between for another project.

I went to my scrap bins, and picked out a bunch of 2.5″ squares to go above and below the cats, with a 1″ strip of blue in between the rows.

For the second potholder, I decided I wanted to frame up the cats a bit more. I like the effect! I used 2.5″ squares all the way around the frames, then cut it down to an approximately 8″ square. There was some waste, but I didn’t feel too bad about it since I was pulling from my scrap bin anyway.

I spray-basted the potholders, using a layer each of cotton batting and Insul-Bright between the patchwork and the backing. Then, I straight-line quilted each of them, one inch apart.

I struggled hard with the binding on these. All my previous potholders have been gifts or for personal use, so if the binding is a little wonky, I’ve shrugged and moved on. But because these were going to go on sale (W.O.W.) it felt very different. I ended up ripping the binding off the first one and completely re-sewing it to the front of the piece. It didn’t fix all of the original wonky-ness, but it helped. I realized that on such small pieces, the binding has much more of a presence. You can tell if the stitches aren’t perfectly straight, or if something goes wrong, much more easily. I’m still looking over at my hard work and cringing a bit.

After re-doing the first potholder’s binding, I tried to take it slower, more methodically, on the second. And it worked; it turned out better. Not perfect, but better. I’m trying to frame this as a testament to hard work, persistence and practice. Plus, embracing imperfection doesn’t necessitate always settling for something that I know I can improve.

Here’s a close-up of the most glaring ick in my binding. I got sloppy when I made the binding into a continuous loop, and this was a result.

Other than this, there are no glaring flaws, just some mismatched thread (because I, for whatever reason, have refused to purchase thread in any shade other than an off-white), waving sewing, and potholders that are a bit off square.

And I still love the goofy cats. They’ve endeared themselves to me. Perhaps I will be inspired to make something out of that fabric for myself. Or at least to expand my thread collection.

One of my goals for my future posts is to improve the quality of my photos — if you have any tips, let me know!

I’m linking up to Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts for the first time! Eek!