CATalyst

I lost my sewing mojo at some time between the disappearering act and the Impeachment Act; I've got it back now, thanks to little fix-it projects around the house and the cats' persnickety ways.

When I made this tower, I was under the (well-researched) impression that cats love to scratch sisal rope.

They certainly loved scratching the upholstery-fabric-covered posts (Franklin is sniffing one of them), but they never ever touched the sisal post, little pills that they are.

The other two posts' coverings were scratched to shreds, several times, and then the penultimate recovering job was done with some leather scraps I had lurking about. The cats hated that, which certainly was never my intention! I gave them months to warm up to the idea of those leather posts, but it was not to be. Last week I decided to go back into my drawer of upholstery samples and scraps and recover the leather and sisal with cloth (over weird pieces of batting that weren't Warm & Natural--another use-it-up/make-it-gone solution).

The contents of that drawer, a very large drawer at the base of a display cabinet, yielded a whole bunch of stuff. There were pieces too small for the posts (I needed scraps that were at minimum 11"x12"), pieces that were quite large, and every size in between. There were coarse weaves, polished cottons, denim-ish scraps, plastic-finished pieces--this drawer needed a good organizing, STAT!

My experiences with Handsome and Sister taught me how nicely some of these fabrics would wash up in a scrap quilt, so the small pieces were tossed in the Not-100%-Cotton basket for the next donation string quilt. The coarse weaves and some of the denim-ish stuff was set aside to provide additional padding when I recovered the scratching posts. The rest of the pieces held a myriad of possibilities.

I really liked how the Magpie embryonic pod things turned out last year and have been wanting to make more just to have on hand for chorus fundraising efforts. Using the dimensions needed for those, I set aside all the fabrics that would yield one or more bags (or handles). From the remainders, I was able to cobble together coverings for the posts:

As for the project bags (which are fully lined), there's enough fabric to make 13 of them!

Just playing around with fabric again helped unblock the dam, and I'm back again working on the latest QAYG behemoth. The rows are all assembled (11 rows each containing 9 blocks), and at the moment I'm applying the back connecting strips to the top edge of rows 2-11. Once the rows are connected from the back, the top strip will be sewn on and sewn down (that links to a YouTube tutorial). I'm aiming for a completion before the year ends--that seems like a simple and straightforward goal post.