"Tabby's Place" Foundation Piecing

Decided I needed to make something to put up on a bare space on our dining room wall. Cats and plants, two of my favourite things, are the theme of this wall hanging.

I enjoy doing paper piecing blocks, also called foundation piecing…  You don't have to be exact in measuring your fabric pieces and it's a great way to use up scraps.

Recently I got a pack of 100 sheets of Foundation Piecing paper for the computer. This way I can scan the pattern pieces and print out as many as I need.

The old way, you had to trace the pattern multiple times onto thin paper.  That's what I did, (27 times to be exact!) for one of my previous quilts, (which I call "Signs of Autumn") that was made up of all paper pieced blocks,    (See photo of that foundation pieced quilt below.)

Small paper-pieced cat, fabric sewn on

Back of same small cat showing seams sewn on the lines

The fabric strips are sewn right onto the patterned paper,  (To be ripped off later).
The cat and plant patterns are from an old Quiltmaker magazine (2003), a pattern called "Tabby's Place".

Arranging the blocks

The hardest part was placing the blocks in an arrangement that I liked. I did not like the arrangement in the magazine and I skipped putting appliquéd rugs below each cat, too.

Figuring out the sizes of the sashing required to sew the blocks together was tricky. I used my cutting mat to help there as it has 1 inch squares on it.

I worked until midnight last night to get all the saying sewn on and all the blocks together. here is the almost finished quilt top, just missing the outer border.

Then I want to sew some button eye on all the cats to add some interest. :)

Athena checks it out… :)

Here's my "Signs of Autumn" quilt. I am very proud of this one as I used my own design to create it. I had a pattern for the foundation pieced blocks, but not for how to put them together into a quilt top. Up till then, I had never assembled a quilt on the point (sideways like diamonds) and I had no idea how big to make the side or corner triangles (setting squares).

After much searching through quilt magazines to find other quilts assembled this way, none had 14 inch blocks so their directions for those triangle pieces didn't help. A quilter friend finally gave me a link to a table that gives those measurements for all sizes of blocks. Yay, problem solved! I hand quilted the square blocks and free motion quilted the triangles and the sashing on my sewing machine.

25 foundation pieced blocks, arranged 'on the point'.  Two more blocks are in the pillow shams.

This is still one of my favourite quilts, in spite of all the work involved in making my Diamonds Jubilee Bargello… :)

Happy quilting!