it's all your fault (when you read this, you'll know who you are)

It seems my quilty mojo is really back.  I can't get enough.  Last night - well, this morning - I woke up at 1:30 wanting to go sew on my newest project (more on that in a minute) and wondered if the approximately 4 hours of sleep I had gotten so far was enough to get me through Friday?  I could get up now and go sew?!

(I went back to sleep - sweet Emma snuggled up to me and purred me back into slumber.  Turns out that was a good thing after the day I had!)

I still don't have the Christmas Pickle to share.  It's in the same state it was a few days ago and then my thumb split open again tonight at dinner, so I'm Band-Aid Queen again tonight in the hopes it will heal fast and I can sew like the wind tomorrow at my guild's sewing Saturday.

But I did make a decision to start yet another project/challenge.

I've been seeing posts about this Rainbow Scrap Challenge for a few years now.  Apparently it's been going on since 2011, but I haven't known about it quite that long.  But it seems more and more of the blogs I follow are joining.  This year, the wheels started turning.  I have lots of scraps.  And if it's a controlled-color scrappy, I'm learning to be good with that.  But I wanted a goal...a project...something to motivate me to do more than January...

So I thought about it a while, determined to figure out a good way to commit or not commit at all.

And then it hit me...

The Cat Quilt

I've got this pinned a couple of times - different photos - on Pinterest and it's been there a while.  I loved it the second I saw it, but wasn't really in my quilty place at the time.

This is PERFECT!

Scrappy.  Color-controlled.  And CATS!

For a day or two, I mulled over fabrics for the background.  I didn't really want white, though that would look good with bright colored cats.  Grey?  Maybe, but would it play well with ALL the colors?  I looked at the fabric the designer used and liked that...what I could see of it...

Off to one of the local quilt shops.  The owner was there (she's pretty cool and belongs to our guild, so I've gotten to know her some) and tried to help.  I wasn't doing a good job of explaining and while I was looking at fabrics that had a woven-like pattern printed on them, she was suggesting florals.  I finally had the brilliant idea to show her the quilt (well, duh!) and she walked right over to a section of fabric kinda hiding (but if you visit Mr. Buttons, the shop bunny/mascot, you'd probably see them - me? I'm a cat person) and found EXACTLY what I was looking for, though if I had to put it into words what I was looking for, I couldn't.  Probably part of my problem...

How perfect is this?  It's black with white woven in (reminds me of an oxford shirt weave), but reads as a grey from much of a distance.

I bought 4 yards - the rest of the bolt!

I already have my purple scraps ready to go to sew-in tomorrow, too:

(it looks like more than it is, I promise)

I can't wait.  I love starting new projects, but I don't remember the last time I was THIS excited to start a new project.  I mean, how often do you wake up in the middle of the night, contemplating losing 4 hours of sleep just to start a quilt?

So the new background is in the wash (I have this feeling it's going to shrink a bunch and would rather it do that before than after!) and while I was unfolding it to put it in, I saw this sticker:

I'm guessing this was at the start of the bolt so they knew which way to wind it, but I looked carefully at the "back" and "face" sides of the fabric before the whole piece went into the washer and cannot honestly tell you which is which.  So I suppose if nothing else, this sticker is good for a giggle.

And with that, I'm off.  I'm going to live it up this weekend because I already know Monday at work is going to be rough.  Long story short, some folks think they're more important than others.  So I'm going to have a good weekend in preparation!

Happy quilting!

Katie