For The Record

Ellen and Abby have both posted lists of their UFOs (unfinished objects) on their blogs, and when they did, I thought, gosh, that's brave. I'm not sure I want to look at that list in black and white! Then I was cleaning out the sewing room this afternoon, and my husband said, "You ought to start a list of all the projects you have going. You might find something you completely forgot about."

So I'm starting a list. It's over on the right-hand side, and I'll be updating it as I find more things I forgot about. I am only including projects that I have already started and/or bought fabric for; maybe someday I'll start a wish list of things I want to work on in the future, but that's more than I can handle looking at right now! I'm also going to start a list of things I've finished, although that will have to wait for another day. Here's hoping the "finished" list grows faster than the "unfinished" list!

Kitten House

I had the day off work today (another great thing about having a job is that sometimes you can get paid for not going to work!), and I used some of that time to finish up Oliver's playhouse. I've been wanting to make him something he can scratch; not only are the commercially available cat toys pretty tacky, but he won't scratch any of them, so we needed a better solution.

I used SewTakeAHike's tutorial (which is currently not available online, although you can see pictures from her version here) and the fabric is from Deer Valley by Joel Dewberry, which I bought at CityCraft ages ago.

It didn't take long before Oliver wandered over to check it out, with Kate on his heels. She won't quite fit in there, though, and I'm not sure I can handle making a Kate-size playhouse!

I think he likes it! Now if I can just get him to scratch the inside of his house instead of the outside of our furniture, we'll really have something...

Project Notes:

Finished size: Approx. 15" x 18" and 20" high

Materials: Quilting fabric fused to single-sided heavy-duty interfacing

Overall impression: This project took a little longer than I was initially expecting (ha! not the first time I've said that!). But you have to cut out the shapes from both the fabric and the interfacing, fuse them together, zig zag stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying, and then sew it all together, so it does take a little time.

I had a hard time figuring out how to feed it through the sewing machine, especially at the end when I was sewing roof pieces on. I had this big, bulky house hanging off to the left side, and I struggled to get the pieces to feed through evenly. Then it looked a little smashed when I was done. I ironed it and then let it sit with heavy books in it to flatten the base back out, and I think that helped some, but you can still see that it's a little wonky; not the sturdiest construction job ever, but I still think it's pretty cute!