Cats' affinity for fabric during the process of making a quilt is legendary. You can leave a shirt to be ironed on the ironing board for a week and the cat will ignore it. But if you leave a two yard piece of fabric on the same ironing board for a minute, there's a cat on it. Then when you start the actual process of piecing the quilt together into blocks, the cat will ignore the unpieced yardage that you're going to use for the back of the quilt and lie on the patchwork blocks. And if the quilt has a focal point, say it's a nine-block quilt and the center block is different from the other eight, that's the one he'll lie on.