Rail Road Tracks for Animal Rescue

I decided to sew up a new kitty blanket for this month's Free Motion Quilting Challenge. This is the eighth one in the series, inspired by the Snuggles Project, and they're starting to make quite an adorable little pile in my sewing room. All of the blankets will be donated to a local animal rescue organization at the end of the year.

These are the flannel pieces I put together for the front and back:

This month's challenge was a foundational design by Leah Day. It involved drawing a loose wavy line over the blanket as a guide, and then filling the space around it by weaving over the line with another design. I chose to use boxy shapes as my filler to create a rail road pattern. Having a base to follow made drawing the boxes a lot easier, but I went with such a big scale that the guide line itself was hard to stitch.

I didn't realize when doing this that the boxes were supposed to extend to fill in all of the space. I made them all the same length instead, which made them look more like rails but left a lot of empty space in between. Ah well. Overall, this was a quick and fun design that came out looking okay despite the irregular corners on most of my boxes.

The finished blanket looks like this: