Kitties and Quilts

This is our cat George hunkered down on a quilt for a long winter nap.  We have been surrounded by ginger kitties this past week!!

This is Paca, my daughter's cat.  We were babysitting while she has been off to Paris and then Seattle.

This is her other kitty Jahi who favors one of the newer quilts on the sofa downstairs.  All our kitties have started shedding so spring can't be too far away!

Well, I went on ebay and managed to find more of the print that I had used to make the hexagons, figuring I would use as a border.  I didn't like it.  I then decided that maybe I would use triangles and just some of the print in the border.  Didn't like that either.  So...

I am going with it as is with no extra border besides the green which kind of acts to float the middle.  I am pretty sure I have enough of the green to use for the binding as well.  It will end up being 72 x 76 inches which should fit on a queen sized bed.  I will include that nice extra hexagon fabric on the back so you can see the original fabric which is not even a little obvious from the finished product here!!  This quilt has really been fun to make.  Have to get busy on a challenge quilt and facing the beach quilt before my  bridge playing guests arrive in a little over a week!!

I will be playing tournament bridge for the first time since college almost 50 years ago!!  I wasn't that good even then and the conventions have changed a lot since .  I can barely remember my name these days so counting trump will be a real challenge!!  

My dear friend will then be returning less than a month later to babysit the kitties while hubby and I go on a once in a lifetime trip to New Zealand and Fiji.  We have all our transportation booked and just have to book a few hotels at this point.  One of my old roommates from college is now a NZ citizen and so she has given me some great hints of things to do as we are not on any kind of formal trip.  She recommended that we don't go to Christchurch because of the earthquake that badly damaged the city but encouraged us to book the two day Doubtful Sound Cruise out of Queenstown where she lived for five  years before building a home in Duneden. Too bad she is here in the States while we are there!!  I am most nervous about the almost 36 hours that it will take -- I don't even know what the difference in time will be but we will be crossing the International Date Line so it will be a different day as well!!  My oldest daughter lived in Auckland for several months working at the University of Auckland between undergraduate and grad school.