Cats and Quilts

I have two cats. Roo and Limpy. Roo is so named because her brother was a big orange tomcat. So we had the brother/sister duo of Tigger and Roo. I've had her for about 11 years now, so she's a grand old dame.

Limpy is so named because I was crazy enough to ask my husband what to name him. (Boy, that's the last time I make that mistake!) Limpy was a stray who showed up at our back door occasionally. My husband is allergic so we really couldn't adopt another indoor cat. We tried to shoo him away for quite awhile, but one day he showed up with a hurt back leg and was (you guessed it!) limping. When I saw that, I was a goner. I can't stand to see a hurt animal. So we fed him. He was very skittish, but he wasn't feral. We think someone dumped him when they moved out of the neighborhood. So we fed him, made friends, took him to the vet (boy, you should have heard the vet techs snicker when I told them his name was Limpy) and got him shots, fixed, and patched up. But we still don't really consider him "our cat." He comes and goes throughout the neighborhood and I'm quite sure he drops in on a few other suckers families for snacks and pets.

At any rate, I've been working on a couple of quilts and have had them spread out on my design wall floor. Invariably, Limpy wants to sleep smack dab in the middle of whatever quilt is on the floor at the moment. This is all well and good, but like I said, Limpy is an outdoor cat. He often comes in sopping wet, dragging leaves, after having walked through the red, southern dirt (he looks like he's been eating Cheetos with his paws!). I really have no problem with cat fur (which can be removed with a good lint brush). But I draw the line at a cat gunking up an almost finished quilt with red clay.

I don't pretend to understand the motivation that cats have, but I do know that if there is fabric or paper on the floor, they MUST sleep on it. Loll on it. Heave contented sighs as they knead it to death. I can't fight a cat's determination. They'll win every time. The solution (obviously!) is to make each cat their own quilt. So here's Limpy with his own personal cat quilt.