Family Photo Album 🐾🐾😉

When presented with an incredible rainbow of fabrics and asked to design some kit patterns…well, I simply could not help myself. Like the character in “The Sixth Sense” who sees ghosts, I apparently see felines everywhere! (Much better company, I might add..)

My goal was to create relatively simple designs, avoiding my customary (obsessive?) thread painting and use of fabric ink. If someone is going to create a pet portrait for the first time, they might not have a drawerful of bottles and pens. So, these are all created with fabric (Windham’s fabulous “Bedrock”), MistyFuse (of course) and Aurifil thread (ditto of course ;)).

First up: our silver and black beauty…referring to a photo as I always do, this:

…became this:

Thread choices: a light and a darker red…medium and light grey (the stitching on the white portions uses that very light grey, much more interesting than white)…two shades of green for the eyes…and true white for eye highlights and whiskers. Create texture in the background and “pillows” with different stitch fill patterns.

Next up, Jackson (of course ;))! My first photo of him, when he wandered into our backyard, is one of my favorites.

I like to interpret this one in a more stylized version. It goes very quickly if you free-cut the leaves (2 of which of course become the eyes)…and cutting thin on-the-bias strips gives you the “vines.”

Streamlined thread choices here! Black (50wt for cat, 12wt for his whiskers), green and a glorious light purple (2520) for the background.

Third, the new star of our family 🧡. Having only about a gazillion photos of Loki already, I chose this one:

Note how well he complements that quilt made from Janine’s first Uppercase collection! As my aim was simple, I opted for a marvelous blue as the background and an easy-to-construct prop (a knitting project):

To avoid the need for lots of thread, I endeavored to add kitten fur by making his jawline fluffy (in contrast to the smooth profiles of his siblings). This piece is admittedly more complex and so used more shades of Aurifil!