Cats, Flying Geese, and Butterflies

 Welcome to Treadlestitches, and welcome to April!

It's a new month, and the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color of the month is yellow.  Now's our chance to cut up our yellow scraps and sew them into blocks for future quilts.  I started with my Rainbow Kitties, just because they're so much fun.  

I think of these more like stuffed animals than real cats.  In addition to prints with birds and dogs, we've got stars, swirls, flowers, and even sushi.  I can hardly wait to put these into quilts for children.

Yellow is really brightening up the sewing room, especially on all the rainy days this week.  Yellow scraps also looked good today, when we had sun and blue skies.

The yellow 3-D Flying Geese are flying in this week, too.  I'm getting lots of ideas of what to make with them when I have all the colors done.  I might try a couple of different options. 

Last week I mentioned this project, a UFO dating from (probably) the 1970s, that started out with large butterfly-shaped blocks to applique, and which I changed to these pieced butterfly blocks.  Here are the yellow ones.  A very bright (screaming?) yellow was popular in the 70s, and often had little flowers/figures in blue, red, and green.  I'm finishing the quilt as a donation to charity from the ladies at the church where our quilt guild meets.  This week I got all 20 blocks done, so I'm excited to choose sashing, cornerstone, and border fabrics.

Just a word about poly-cotton fabric.  Processes to make it were invented starting in the 1950s, and by the mid 1960s even kids like me had heard of "permanent press".  I remember my grandmother talking about how great it was with the neighbor lady.  Ironing was a huge chore when clothes were made of 100% cotton.  By the 1970s, when I was starting to quilt, it was tough to find any 100% cotton in the fabric stores.

There are lots of different kinds of polyester and poly cotton fabrics from this time period.  The best ones are 50% poly and 50% cotton.  Almost all the gingham in this era is 65% poly and 35% cotton, and it is slippery, nearly see-through, and pills after just a few washings.  Not ideal.

When I chose which butterflies to use, I picked the ones that would hold up the best and would also contrast with the muslin background.  I ended up with 16 blocks, and added 4 more from my vintage scraps.  I didn't use the original blue gingham, but I replaced it with a red and white vintage cotton gingham (I'll show more pictures as I finish the top).

I'm enjoying "remodeling" this old project, and I hope the church ladies will be pleased.

On a rainy Saturday afternoon, I started work on this puzzle.  It's called Caterday Afternoon.  See all the cats?  I didn't even try to count them all.  There were only 500 pieces in it, and it was great fun finding all the colorful cats.  Not too challenging, but I'm not working puzzles to drive myself crazy!  As I worked on it I realized several reasons why I liked it.

There were at least two tuxedo cats, which Snicklefritz and I heartily approved.

Books about knitting sat on shelves.  Hmm, there are a few books like that in this house.  Lots of the cats in the puzzle had knitted sweaters.  Hard to imagine cats putting up with that!  I'm just knitting dish cloths with cotton yarn at the moment.  (Isn't it fun how variegated yarn turns out?)

The cat puzzle also had several houseplants.  After a long winter, I'm building up my windowsill garden with herbs.  The rosemary and lavender survived from last year, and I've added this basil...

and thyme.  The last two were small plants from the grocery store which are happily growing, especially on days like today when the sun encourages them.

I'm not sure what these blue flowers are called.  They were blooming at a school where my Little Guy has speech lessons.  It's lovely to see flowers coming back to life.  Welcome, Spring!  Glad you're here.

I'm glad you are here, too!  Have a wonderful week, whatever the weather gives us.

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

P.S.  One more photo of our little boys at the Children's Museum, specifically the Harley exhibit:

Go, guys, go!  But don't forget your helmets!