PLAYing around with the back of the Legend of Zelda quilt....

The front of the Legend of Zelda quilt is done; pics coming soon, but my son also wanted a pieced back --- specifically, a cat.

No problem. I have EQ7 so I chose a simple cat block and made a medallion quilt design, a simple strip border to frame the block, and then the rest is the green backing flannel. I finished the front of the quilt last weekend, and got ready to cut orange fabric for the giant cat.

Except, the cutting directions were all bigger than the pieces of fabric I had. Yikes. What to do???

Well, luckily I've been reading the blog of Virginia Findlay Wolfe, author of "15 Minutes of PLAY," a lovely book all about improv piecing and creating what she calls "made fabric" from scraps and such.

The point of her actual book (which I received in e-format as a Mother's Day gift! yay!!) is to be creative, let the fabric tell you what it wants to be, etc. Don't cut and piece with a goal or end result in mind. -ahem-  Well, I had to break the rules and instead followed two of the main principles she mentions --- Use what you have, make what you need.

all the strips

Inspired by her book and blog, I cut all the orange fabrics into wonky strips. Then I set about sewing them back together into rectangles more or less the right size. My original plan was to then cut the precise pieces that I needed, some of which involved printing templates to get oh-so-precise triangles and all. -ahem- again. No thank  you.

separated into dark orange and light orange (more or less...)

Instead, I sewed and sewed and sewed until I had three gigantic rectangles and a smaller one. Body, body, body, head. Then I sewed two sort of triangley shaped bits for ears, and a long narrow-ish bit for the tail. Then I brought over widths of the green flannel and cut and sewed and cut and sewed some more until I had a head strip, an ears strip and a tail strip, and then I put it all together and wound up with this somewhat wonky, but still fairly adorable, improv pieced quilt cat.

one very wonky, very improv, stripey strippy orange cat

On to the border/frame and then the rest of the back, and maybe, just maybe, by this time tomorrow I'll have a finished quilt, front and back, to show off. Maybe. Wish me luck!