Kitty Calendar

Jonne sent me these embroidered Kitty Days of the Week.  They’ve been sitting in a box in my studio for a while. I also have some embroideries with women doing similar chores on the same days of the week that Bev sent me.

I remember my friend Mary Kellogg talking about doing laundry on Mondays. I think she even wrote a poem about it.  (I’ll have to find it.)  But except for my Amish neighbors, these house cleaning rituals seem to have vanished (thankfully) with modern conveniences.

I pulled out all the Days of the Week embroideries I have and had a good look at them,  wondering how to use them and if they all belonged together or would be used for different pieces.

I settled on working with the cats or at least starting there.

It was a challenge because there’s so much white space and I didn’t want the pieces to look boxed in.  So I sat down with my Gee’s Bend book for inspiration.  When I saw a quilt that had lots of white fabric and each piece bled into another piece of fabric with a lot of white, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

The flowered table cloth had all the right colors and a good amount of white between them.  When I laid it next to Tuesday’s kitty, I saw that “ironing board shape” and filled the diagonals in with the fabric that is a pattern for Amish dolls.

I saw shapes around the rest of that cat that seemed to work with the images too.  Most of the kitties don’t look too happy with the work they’re doing, or maybe I’m projecting that on them. Except for the Saturday cat, who I distinctly saw with an arch around her.

I’ve never sewn a curve like that before and I considered not doing it.  But nothing else I pictured would do.  So I watched a video on YouTube on how to sew a circle.  It was helpful, and as you can see it worked.

Those little cats, working so hard,  taught me something new.

There were five cats in all.  This is where I’ll leave today.  I have to get ready for Bellydancing and have just enough time to post my selfie with Biddy.