A couple of years ago I saw a quilt that captured my imagination. It was called Stairway to Heaven. I did a little searching and I discovered that it was originally published in McCalls in 1997 and was designed by Barbara Dubovsky. Here is the link to the pattern:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070302220618/http:/mccallsquilting.com/golden/mg01_pattern/index.html
Make sure you look for the link to the printable PDF templates for the cats and the moon.
I have been wanting to make this quilt for a special lady who turned into a crazy cat lady early in life. On Monday, December 26 I got up and decided to start making my own version. That day I also got sick. Luckily I had already made all the fence rail blocks from my various pink fabrics. I puttered along at getting the quilt getting together and finally finished piecing it on Thursday, December 29 despite the fact that I was still sick. On Friday I was feeling a little better so I loaded the quilt on my longarm and then crashed and took a nap. All afternoon I worked on quilting it and finished about 6. My plan was to bind the quilt on Saturday, but something told me I better get it done. About 10:30 I decided to just make the binding. Step by step I just kept going and finished at about 12:15AM.
Saturday I was a mess. So wiped out I couldn’t do anything. I did manage to get a ribbon around the quilt and a Quilt Care packet tucked inside. My husband went to the New Year’s Eve party for our tribe and gifted the quilt to my bonus daughter-in-law Frazier. She was thrilled.
For the record. . . I didn’t follow the pattern at all. My quilt is made up of 9″ blocks and uses Fence Rail blocks instead of nine patches. The cat templates that come with the pattern were too small and I wanted some different poses. I found some cat silhouettes on Google and imported and resized them in Photoshop. I used Heat and Bond Lite to attach the cats and then I satin stitched around the edges. That took quite a while. I used a really cute digital quilting pattern called “Kitty Cat Love 2” designed by Kalynda Grant for Intelligent Quilting and it looked great on the Cuddle fabric from Shannon.
To make the 9″ (finished) blocks I used strips that were 3.5″ x the width of the fabric. I sewed three together and then cut them into 9.5″ squares. The blue part is mostly longer 9.5″ strips.