My swap partner in the Mini QT swap received her quilt from me today, so I can finally show off what I made for her without ruining the surprise.

The theme this month was 'houses'. My partner, Susan, aka FlossieBlossoms, loves anything tropical, pirate, cats, whimsical, or with bits that move or are 3-D. I took that idea, mulled it around a bit, and dove off the edge on a tangent. Here's the result:









This is "The Cat Pirates' Sand Castle". I took a 3-D pop-up card template, enlarged it so I could work with it easier, and used that for the foundation of the castle. Then I decided that I needed something to see through the doorway, and found a bunch of cat pirate pictures on the internet and DeviantArt. Too many for just the doorway, so I decided the castle needed windows. I printed the pictures in miniature on fabric and set them aside.

I fused sandy castle wall fabric to one side of a stiff interfacing, cut out the windows, then attached the miniature pictures facing out through the windows, and fused a second piece of fabric over the pictures to cover the back side of the castle pieces. Lots of satin stitching later, the pieces got trimmed, stitched along the fold lines and around the openings.

The hardest part for me was deciding what to do for the background, which included the 'wall' behind and the 'floor' in front of the castle. After some scrounging around in my stash, I found the sky fabric for the background. It's actually got a huge sailboat on it, but that's hidden behind the castle so it doesn't show. Then it was a bit of some cool stone fabric that I got in a birthday card from Flossie and some other bits for a garden on the ground in front of the castle. I hauled out a pirate-y piece of fabric for the back, and then had to figure out how the hinge was going to work.

I knew I couldn't just butt up the edges of the wall and floor interfacing because the castle had some bulk. So I guesstimated the distance I'd need, reinforced the backing fabric in that area with a little stabilizer, and stuck down my stiff interfacing squares. I sewed together the background fabrics and then fused them down to the other side. Some careful measuring was involved to get the locations to sew the tabs down on the pop-up parts in just the right places, and it was nearly done!

Last to happen was the binding and label. I had to sew the binding to the back first, because there was no way I could get the side with the castle under the machine. Then I hand sewed it down to the front. I created the label like I usually do on my PrintMaster graphics program, printed it on fabric, and sewed it on.

These last two pictures are from Flossie's photostream. Her pictures of the windows and goodies turned out better than mine.


Goodie notes: The Mountain Bars are a local specialty chocolate that my hubby recommended for me to send to people far away. The cat fabrics were leftovers from making this quilt, and the skull & hearts flannel was a leftover piece from making a chemo cap for Nikki.