50!! Month 5! Eclipse!

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

Check it out! I'm really loving this project.  :D

And guess what?! I'm 50 years old today!!  I think that is the most awesome thing in the world. I am super jazzed to arrive at this superb age and hope to see another awesome age in a decade.

You'll notice that I'm focused solely on my "Down the Rabbit Hole" BOM for now. This point of work catches me up through the Month 5 set of instructions. Two more months to do (with a third coming out in a week and half). When I'm there, I'll go back to rotating through a different BOM for different weeks of the month.

How do you like those mushrooms for a perfect photo accompaniment? They're rather huge (this quilt top is now at 49" square).

Hey - as I was sewing borders on, I wondered if any of you also have "Betweeners" work that you keep alongside your machine? ("Leader-enders" in Bonnie-Hunter-speak)

My Betweeners project right now is making crumb blocks in a blue scheme. 

Anything blue that is too small to cut a 2.5" square or a 1.5" strip from is kept in a shoebox to my left, and when I need to take my real sewing out of the machine to do the other side or the next stage, I grab a couple little scraps (or amalgamation of scraps like you see here) and whip them through so I never have tails to deal with in my "real" sewing unless I'm changing thread color. If a scrap is sewn to another color, I let that work its way into my blocks, like this cream here that was attached to a sparkly sky blue that was cut out from behind an old applique project.

So far I have about 35  4.5 inch blocks. I work my scraps up until I have a sheet maybe 10 x 18 inches, and then cut several blocks out and pin them on my working board. When they fill the upper area, I group them into 10s so I can keep track of how many there are. And the scraps that come from cutting the blocks out - those go right back in that shoebox for more "mud play." It's fun, it's mindless, it's fast, and in the long term it results in something cool from nothing.

I have a neat plan for them and some yardage in my stash when I have about 3 times that many blocks and enough to make a 2.5 inch all-around border. 

"Blueberry Crumb Cake"


(Never fear - crumb-size scraps in other colors aren't thrown out, but those live sorted into the other color bins in my storage until I'm finished with blues.)


Hopefully this post will go off the way it's supposed to. I've got it pre-made and auto-set, as we're taking off at 3am today to go to Scott's parents' to have a mini-reunion Eclipse Viewing Party. They live 6 hours away, smack dab in the middle of the path of totality. Another thing I'm really jazzed about right now.

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So, if everything works out properly, it's you're turn! 

Did you get some BOM work done recently?

Kate over at Katie Mae Quilts has joined me in hosting this meet-up,

and linking up from either end puts you on the party at both sides.

Pets on Quilts 2017 - Cats with ATTITUDE on quilts (entry 2)

"You may NOT take this quilt!"

Isabeau is a funny girl. She's a ragdoll kitty, but she was born with a crooked eye, so she's super neurotic and won't let anyone touch her. Or even look at her. 

But boy, does she love this quilt. (Good thing for her, it's Scott's and lives here at the house.) Any time it is laying out she wants on it. (This quilt's story was posted here.)

Clara wanted on it, too, but was only allowed to squeeze onto an edge.

Navarre, for once, left off with pestering Isabeau about something she wanted to claim, and he waited for the next priority project.

"Why are there only DOGS? Where are the MEs?"

Although, guess who decided she wanted this quilt, too?!

(That quilt was featured in my other Pets on Quilts entry, posted here.)

~*~*~

Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

This awesome show's link-up is open through the weekend, so there's still time for you to make an entry or two~!

Pets On Quilts 2017 - "Lori & Aliya" (entry 1)

Pets on Quilts is one of my all-time favorite quilt shows!  
I'm entering this quilt into the "Pet-themed Quilted Project" category

And it gives me the perfect opportunity to put together an overdue Finish Report for one of my absolute favorite quilts:

"Lori & Aliya"

This quilt, after washing and blocking, measures 55 x 55 inches.

It has all-cotton top fabrics, a Minky back, and Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting. Everything was prewashed, including the batting, to minimize shrinkage. I re-engineered the construction of Jenny Pedigo's "Metro Hoop" pattern to produce an unpieced ring center for the cameos.

I finished this quilt about 5 weeks ago. It has been a long labor of love for a super good friend from our Florida days. The top was made in 2014, and for various reasons on both ends, it got put on standby a few times. This year when it entered the priority queue, it took many weeks of intense free-motion work to get it all quilted up on my domestic Viking Sapphire. 

I'm in Colorado now, and Lori's in Kentucky. But while we were still in Florida, Lori and I enjoyed tea and dinner and a DVD together at my place every Thursday night after she got off work.

Lori commissioned this quilt to feature cameos of her super-duper awesome canine bestie, Aliya. I like the way this filter choice showcases the portraits: 

I worked hard to develop quilting templates from favorite photos that would reflect her pretty German Shepherd-ness and hopefully capture her personality while working effectively with the way quilting makes fabric puff and flatten. (That process was blogged here.)

 

Lots of detail work happened in those cameos! I can't tell you how many hours were spent tying and tucking tails! It took many sessions of watching movies, that I distinctly remember.

When I asked Lori what kind of quilting she wanted other than the cameos, she said she wanted traditional feathers, bones, and dog paws. My quilter brain was reeling - "Waaa!!  How on EARTH can you put all that together on a modern ring design and have a semblance of cohesiveness?"

But you know how your brain works away at things in the background, and then you wake up at 2:30 am with an "Aha!" moment? Yeah, that happened with this quilt, and when I pulled out my plexiglass oversheet to be able to doodle on top of the quilt, some play time with dry-erase markers teased out the design that would work.

I can quilt a lot prettier than I can draw! Go figure.

And the execution of the idea was a huge success. 

I love so much how Minky backing showcases quilting work:

Wait, I said earlier that this was all free-motion work, but I did use my walking foot to stabilize the whole quilt with stitch-in-ditch and echo lines around the arcs before I started the real work.

I used Aurifil 50wt threads in matching colors everywhere, except the portraits got a subtly variegated King Tut 40wt to stand out, and the paws got a gray contrast Aurifil. (Note: cotton threads can be problematic with Minky backings, as it sometimes grasps the "fur" and pulls fibers through to the front a bit. This will show when the thread is a different color from the Minky. In future I'll stick with slicker fibers for this backing.)

Stitching the binding down on this quilt was a little interesting, as my stitching hand was in an immobilizer due to a bit of a boxer's break that I got when I did a knife hand power break incorrectly while practicing for a Taekwondo tournament.

Aliya loves cats, which is good, because my boy Navarre loved this quilt, and I didn't have to confine myself always to the only room that is cat free.

My kitty was very helpful during some of the prep stages, offering paw marking aid. . . 

(No, Navarre, we're using Aliya's paw!)

. . . and suggesting I include his adorable otter pose in the design. . .

. . . REALLY suggesting I use that pose. . . 

He's a constant photo bomber on indoor shots, my funny little friend (as you can see here with one of my Fiesta Mexico blocks).

Poor boy cries and cries at the screen door now that I have a longarm in its own room that's kept cat-free, but that's for another post of its own.  :D

"Lori & Aliya" was the last quilt to be finished on my domestic machine, which adds to its specialness for me. Thanks for letting me share it in a special venue.

The show link-up is active for a couple more days, so you have time to get a post together if you want to participate this year. 

Huge thanks to Snoodles at Lily Pad Quilting for coordinating this every year. I know it has to be an enormous amount of work.

~*~*~

Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

TGIFF at A Quarter Inch from the Edge