Pineapples and Lucky Cats

I think I need to practice updating more often and in smaller bits. I've been thinking it over the past couple of days and realized I was going to make one giant post after the project I'm making is done. I need to either make posts more often during the progress or cut to the basics so it doesn't take over an hour for me to write up a post. I'm normally much more succinct verbally but tend to type up a storm.

Sunday we picked up a small pineapple on sale at the grocery store. It tasted so good it was gone in a day. Last year, I had found some information online about growing the pineapple top. I searched around and found this page:
http://www.rickswoodshopcreations.com/Pineapple/pineapple.htm
My pineapple top is drying out now and will hopefully get planted.

I have a bit of a brown thumb but this looks doable. If it doesn't work out, I'll try again with the next pineapple.

On the quilting front, I'm in the middle of an applique' project. It's my first. I decided to do it when I was looking at Fat Cat Patterns' website and saw how simple their patterns looked and they were free! I decided on the Maneki Neko, Lucky Cat, pattern because who couldn't use more luck? The Maneki Neko is a darling welcomer of luck and money in Japan and ceramic statues can be found in every business and as the Fat Cat Patterns logo. Me and my kids went to a Japanese dollar like store in Houston and now I regret not picking one up. When I saw this pattern, after we came back, I knew it would be my first fusible applique' project.

Here's my pattern, all taped up, and the fabrics I choose to do the cat in on the left. The background will be the red print on the right. I just picked the FQs up at JoAnn's when we were there the other day. I have a tendency to use inexpensive fabric the first time around on a project.

My daughter auditioned where the brown and orange brown were going on the cat in Photoshop. She's fortunately a wiz at it and it's faster than cutting extra pieces that won't be used.

So with everything together, I got to tracing and cutting out my fusible web pieces and noticed my first mistake: I didn't take off the scaling when I printed out my patterns. It wasn't a big deal though because as you can see from the taped pattern, it's almost 12 inches square so I'm still going to put it in a 12 inch background.

My second mistake became evident when I started fusing my fabric pieces together. The inexpensive white fabric was so thin that it didn't cover the dark pieces underneath. I'm letting that go as a learning experience. I did some topstitching over the white to distract the eye from the shadows underneath and trimmed the fish body under the paw. Next time I'll use better fabric.

I added the whiskers with some topstitching and in the eyes also. It's layered with batting and backing and I'm in the middle of quilting it. I hope to finish it tomorrow.