Door busting
Dec. 12th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merrileemakesI have a problem and I decided to try and solve it with sewing.
The problem is this.
Jasmine is a 10 year old baby princess. She's the sweetest, stupidest, most clingy and affectionate cat I've ever met. I love her to bits. Jasmine is also slowly, over the years, loosing the use of her back legs through some disease process that multiple vets can't diagnose or find any treatment that helps. Jasmine has a final day coming up in the not-too-distant future and for this reason, among many others, that I choose to spoil her rotten.
Jasmine is an indoor cat but has had supervised outside time in a cat-containment yard. The last few years Jasmine has been asking for more and more time outside, which she loves. She gambols after butterflies, stalks birds and explores in the bushes (yes, all with wobbly back legs, it's adorable). But she's also a massive sook and needs the door to be propped open so she can go inside at any time and if she realises the door is closed at any point she panics.
So we spend a lot of time these days with the front door propped open, which is great for Jasmine and her quality of life but terrible in an Australian summer for flies.
While I could solve this problem with buying a curtain or noren, why do that when I could spend many days and much energy sewing something?
I don't like sewing. But I do like having sewn things, and giving people sewn things. So I sew. I do actually like quitting though, especially free motion quitting. The piecing part, meh. I'm not great at precision sewing and getting perfect points. In fact, quilting was the first craft that I decided I could do badly and still enjoy it.
I started with this jelly roll, 40 strips of 2 1/2" wide fabric.
I saw a video on making a jelly roll race quilt ages ago and decided try that approach here as it's quick and easy.
Time for a rough plan.
I went with measurements in inches because everything in quilting is in inches, but then realised I have no idea how to write "inches squared" and also I can't convert inches into any other imperial measurement so things got a bit weird. But I got there.
I don't need all 40 strips in the jelly roll to cover the doorway. The race quilt approach is to just crack the jelly roll and get to sewing, but they're such pretty colours and who am I to pass up an opportunity to play with a pretty gradient? So I worked out how may strips I needed for each panel and rearranged and cut down and slightly rearrange the gradient from 20 colours to 13. The jelly roll had 2 strips of each colour too, so I can make matching panels.
Now I've got the colour sequence down time to sew! The strips are joined on an angle to make it pretty, and you can sew all these little joins one after the other and make a big kinda jellyfish bloorb of fabric and then snip then apart. So here's 2 long snakes of pretty, pretty fabric.
I then measured out each strip into 8 equal length, at and then sewed them together lengthwise to make 2 panels.
I thought about just sewing backing fabric onto the strips and attaching hardware to hang them, but the free motion quiting is my favourite part of this whole project and I wanted to indulge in it. So time to spray baste onto some quilt batting and cut up an old sheet for backing fabric. I'm going to try self-binging because I am legitimately very bed at machine sewing bias binding and refuse to do it by hand because no one has time for that.
Time to quilt!
I went with a swirly border thing and then a meander in the middle. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, very bad quilting. I broke at least 3 major 'rules' for quilting in doing this, but the quilting police haven't caught up with me yet!
Once the quilting was finished, time to trim the batting and then fold over the backing fabric to make the binding. The tutorial I used, How to Self-Bind a Quilt, said to cut the batting off very carefully and I thought I was careful but I ended up cutting the backing fabric, and therefore the fabric for binding in at least 4 places. And then spent over an hour cutting out and sewing on tiny little patches. For the next panel I trimmed the batting extremely carefully.
Now to sew down the binding and then add the hanging hardware. I went with one of the left over strips from the jelly roll and some metal D rings.
And now brining it all together.
It was at this exact moment I realised I should have stuck to using my quilting sewing machine with the larger work area, because this rolled up panel only just fit on my standard machine.
But it worked!
I'm really pleased with how they turned out. Super colourful, they block some of the heat and flies, and still let us come in and out of the doorway. Although I did just realise in posting these photos that I intended them to be mirrors of each other and I ended up sewing the hardware on so they face the same way. Oops.
When they're not in use they hang in the hallway next to the door, next to our other cat Sienna's harness and catbib.
The problem is this.
Jasmine is a 10 year old baby princess. She's the sweetest, stupidest, most clingy and affectionate cat I've ever met. I love her to bits. Jasmine is also slowly, over the years, loosing the use of her back legs through some disease process that multiple vets can't diagnose or find any treatment that helps. Jasmine has a final day coming up in the not-too-distant future and for this reason, among many others, that I choose to spoil her rotten.
Jasmine is an indoor cat but has had supervised outside time in a cat-containment yard. The last few years Jasmine has been asking for more and more time outside, which she loves. She gambols after butterflies, stalks birds and explores in the bushes (yes, all with wobbly back legs, it's adorable). But she's also a massive sook and needs the door to be propped open so she can go inside at any time and if she realises the door is closed at any point she panics.
So we spend a lot of time these days with the front door propped open, which is great for Jasmine and her quality of life but terrible in an Australian summer for flies.
While I could solve this problem with buying a curtain or noren, why do that when I could spend many days and much energy sewing something?
I don't like sewing. But I do like having sewn things, and giving people sewn things. So I sew. I do actually like quitting though, especially free motion quitting. The piecing part, meh. I'm not great at precision sewing and getting perfect points. In fact, quilting was the first craft that I decided I could do badly and still enjoy it.
I started with this jelly roll, 40 strips of 2 1/2" wide fabric.
I saw a video on making a jelly roll race quilt ages ago and decided try that approach here as it's quick and easy.
Time for a rough plan.
I went with measurements in inches because everything in quilting is in inches, but then realised I have no idea how to write "inches squared" and also I can't convert inches into any other imperial measurement so things got a bit weird. But I got there.
I don't need all 40 strips in the jelly roll to cover the doorway. The race quilt approach is to just crack the jelly roll and get to sewing, but they're such pretty colours and who am I to pass up an opportunity to play with a pretty gradient? So I worked out how may strips I needed for each panel and rearranged and cut down and slightly rearrange the gradient from 20 colours to 13. The jelly roll had 2 strips of each colour too, so I can make matching panels.
Now I've got the colour sequence down time to sew! The strips are joined on an angle to make it pretty, and you can sew all these little joins one after the other and make a big kinda jellyfish bloorb of fabric and then snip then apart. So here's 2 long snakes of pretty, pretty fabric.
I then measured out each strip into 8 equal length, at and then sewed them together lengthwise to make 2 panels.
I thought about just sewing backing fabric onto the strips and attaching hardware to hang them, but the free motion quiting is my favourite part of this whole project and I wanted to indulge in it. So time to spray baste onto some quilt batting and cut up an old sheet for backing fabric. I'm going to try self-binging because I am legitimately very bed at machine sewing bias binding and refuse to do it by hand because no one has time for that.
Time to quilt!
I went with a swirly border thing and then a meander in the middle. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, very bad quilting. I broke at least 3 major 'rules' for quilting in doing this, but the quilting police haven't caught up with me yet!
Once the quilting was finished, time to trim the batting and then fold over the backing fabric to make the binding. The tutorial I used, How to Self-Bind a Quilt, said to cut the batting off very carefully and I thought I was careful but I ended up cutting the backing fabric, and therefore the fabric for binding in at least 4 places. And then spent over an hour cutting out and sewing on tiny little patches. For the next panel I trimmed the batting extremely carefully.
Now to sew down the binding and then add the hanging hardware. I went with one of the left over strips from the jelly roll and some metal D rings.
And now brining it all together.
It was at this exact moment I realised I should have stuck to using my quilting sewing machine with the larger work area, because this rolled up panel only just fit on my standard machine.
But it worked!
I'm really pleased with how they turned out. Super colourful, they block some of the heat and flies, and still let us come in and out of the doorway. Although I did just realise in posting these photos that I intended them to be mirrors of each other and I ended up sewing the hardware on so they face the same way. Oops.
When they're not in use they hang in the hallway next to the door, next to our other cat Sienna's harness and catbib.
*sees cat photo* *subscribes*
Date: 22 December 2025 08:07 pm (UTC)Oh geeze what a pain! They look great though, I love the colors.
Re: *sees cat photo* *subscribes*
Date: 23 December 2025 01:34 am (UTC)