Anne’s Creative Threads

I recently completed a small wall hanging that I was asked to make for some people who are shortly leaving Brunei and the design was based on one that I had made several years ago of one of our cats sitting on the patio wall at sunset. The original wall hanging was one of my earliestart quilts and because it featured one of our cats was too special to part with, and I’m so glad that we did keep it because very sadly Aicha the black and white cat featured in the design passed away two weeks ago. She was sixteen years old and still quite active but had been unwell for some time. I will always be able to remember her sitting on the wall with the tropical sunset and watching everything going on.

The photoshows the work in progress on my original wall hanging with Aicha keeping a close eye on it. The sky was hand painted and I decided to do the same for my recent piece. I haven’t done any fabric painting for a while so it was fun to get my paints out again.

This was the fabric I painted for the tropical sunset sky.

My recent design was a little different from the original one as there were to be two cats on the wall, one of them a tabby. The tabby was quite a challenge as the people who wanted the quilt were going to bring me a photo but then were too busy so I had to just use my judgement and hope that I would get it right. I chose a grey subtly striped fabric and then used a fabric marker pen to draw the stripes.

The two cats on the wall, everything pinned in place and ready to stitch. I used invisible machine applique to stitch the design as I didn’t want raw edges.

The finished design, two cats beside each other on the wall, dense vegetation and the tropical Brunei sunset in the background. I used a narrow accent border of deep red print batik to create contrast with the outer dark green border and to pick up some of the colours of the sunset sky.