I am sure that some of you know that I am a humanist celebrant.  I do non-religious namings and weddings.  I like to give the baby a present when I do a naming, and this particular baby was adorable and had an unusual name.  For this reason I decided to make her something with her name on it, and because she loves cats so much, it had to be a cat.  The decoration is inspired by the patterns that Klimt used in so many of his paintings:

The famous Adele Bloch paintings are a treasure trove of decorative ideas.  I used some gold fabric and stitched them on:

I left the back fairly plain:

The face is a combination of the gold and some felt:

 

I embroidered the name in backstitch with perle cotton.

It’s quite easy to make, and I give a sort of cartoon set of instructions below.  It isn’t my idea, but I can’t remember where I got it from.  If I do find the original, I will post it separately.  Essentially, it’s the sleeve of a felted sweater, so you could make two from a jumper.  The head comes from spare fabric.

You need to chop the sleeve off at the length you want the height of the cat to be – so a child’s sweater will probably be the whole sleeve but a man’s is probably 50-75%.  The head could come out of the spare sleeve fabric, I expect.

The woman at the top of the page is my PhD supervisor, by the way.  This is a sort of memorial to her, because her birthday was in November.