The Bear-Paw Quilt.

Pattern: Self-designed. I really liked the bear-paw block--I love triangles. Well, this quilt almost cured me of that. The blocks are 10.5", and the quilt is about 95"x95". I suspect I originally designed for 12" blocks but my cutting and sewing is not that accurate (especially with triangles), so everything ended up being smaller. Of course 95" square is none too small. I designed the corners of the border myself at the last minute when I decided that normal borders would be boring.

Fabric: Cotton, with a 200-count white sheet as backing. I read later that high thread count sheets are difficult to handquilt, but I never noticed. I like how the backside feels silky and not coarse.

Batting: Super-thin polyester that mimics cotton. I just went to look at it and I thought it was cotton, but when I rubbed the layers of the quilt between my fingers I could feel the scratchiness of the polyester. My star quilt, which did use a cotton batting, feels much softer between the fingers. (However, you can't tell the difference when you're using it.)

Notes: I think this was my first hand-quilted item. A gal at work taught me how to hand-quilt and I really got a kick out of it. This quilt took me about two years to finish--the quilt took a weekend, the handquilting took 1 year + 362 days--I burned out a few times working on it.

The lightest color fabric used to be an off-white, but the red fabric keeps bleeding. In fact, it bleeds more now than it did as a new fabric. So now it is a pepto-bismol pink & red quilt.

This is the quilt we use on our bed. Below is our cat, Luxor. He loves sitting on my quilts. He is very particular about what textures he sits on (won't sit on leather, polyester carpet, cotton sheets, wool rugs--will sit on towels, cotton rugs, flannel, anything cotton).