color me happy kittens quilt

i have had this fabric for YEARS and never came up with a plan for it.
it was ideally going to be a quilt for my bed when i bought it (which was 3ish years ago i think?) but clearly THAT never happened.
instead, 100 days 100 blocks happened for my bed which was perfectly fine in the end... and probably better than what i would have done at the point in time i bought this fabric.
when it came to spring break last year, lisa and i wanted to plan another sew together to do, so we picked these kitties to do as quilt for us!  (see twin dogs in sweaters quilt for our previous adventure) i decided to run with the "color me happy" line of fabric i had, but couldn't decide on a background color.  i had initially purchased kona leprechaun, but it was just too blah when it all came together.  don't worry, the leprechaun went to a good cause... like a certain 4 turtles.
lisa and i did some shop hopping while together in utah, and i found this FANTASTIC grunge to use (i believe it is deep jade) and it became the perfect blend of blues & greens to go with the main colors of the prints.
i also swapped in some grunge for the main parts of the kitten faces that were cohesive between all the kittens instead of a kona cotton.  when in doubt, get grunge.
the craziest part was that i cut all of the eyes the first night, and then when i came out the next morning, they were gone.  like, straight up vanished in to thin air.
my bet is going to be that when lisa moves out of that apartment, she's going to find a stack of grunge squares waiting for her to start another kittens quilt! yes, even the kitty eyes were grunge...
when it was time to quilt it, i felt like the perfect pantograph was the loop the loop one i have used many times before on music quilts, but this time it fit perfectly like it was yarn the kittens were playing with.  the grunge hits the spot backing was perfect, and i used bits of the same fabrics to create a scrappy binding to go around the outside.  this meant i had to jump back in to my hand binding skills after a good chunk of time practicing my machine binding.
it is safe to say i just love elizabeth hartman patterns for so many reasons.  they're adorable, east to follow and i also just love how she names each of the characters.  each of these 6 kitten blocks have a different name, which was really funny when lisa and i hit late night sew fest tiredness and were discussing these cats by name like they were real.  my mom is intrigued by this pattern, probably because it is much bigger than the cat blocks, so it will be interesting to see when she does it and how her cats turn out!
pattern: the kittens by elizabeth hartman
quilt count: 127