BOM's Away - Wedding Birds

Welcome to the Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

We'd love to see the BOM you're working on lately.

This week's link-up is at the bottom of the post.

So, here we are: Finally posting the link-up again! As my friends know, I've been out with important family events, and my quilting (as well as hosting for much of the time) had to be dropped for a good 3 or 4 weeks. 

Two weeks ago, Devon and I flew down to San Diego to attend Kyle's Family Day and Graduation from the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot. More pictures to come later, but this is my favorite shot:

We flew back home Friday night, and then had their wedding last Sunday here at the house - another favorite shot from that day that I hadn't posted yet:

This past week I've had to do some activities, such as returning the 80 borrowed chairs. I needed to put those up in their storage loft myself since the staff of the facility was crazy-busy preparing for the annual U.S. Open Taekwondo Hanmadang which they were hosting this past Thursday - Saturday. I put in a token participation at said Hanmadang - I dearly love breaking the boards for some reason, so I'd signed up for the creative board breaking event. It's a fun one where you tell people how to hold boards for you, and you move around using whatever strikes or kicks you want to break them. This year we were limited to 6. I'd intended to only do 2 since I haven't been to class for 3 weeks, nor practiced ANY routines for the event. One of the instructors talked me into throwing in 4 more simple moves, so I did. I also improvised with a simplification of a suggestion one master gave to a blackbelt I know for his routine next year (a MAJOR simplification - hah!) And all of that paid off so that I somehow squeaked into the gold for my division! 

Otherwise, I did a LOT of sleeping and started back in with a little bit of FMQ work on Kyle's Marines quilt and some hand stitching on their wedding quilt. You haven't seen anything of that wedding quilt yet. It's not finished. Not by a long shot. I'd wanted to have the top completed for the wedding, but Devon really wanted to be surprised on the day. Badly enough, that she preferred to get the surprise with the top not yet completed than to allow me to finish that part by working on it when she wasn't away at work or school.

The center is a traditional Double Wedding Ring, in a 4x5 configuration. That's surrounded by a wide blue border, which has wedding ribbons appliqued on. It also has pairs of swallows (in a gray that's not really that stark). Those birds are highly important to the couple for their symbolism of versatility in the face of difficult times, faithfulness, and always returning home. There will be 12 pairs altogether - 8 united pairs are on either side of the ribbon hearts centered on each quilt side, and 4 pairs are flying independently in each corner. That's representative of the times they'll be apart from each other during his military career. 

That's my only real quilt work this week - no Block of the Month work yet. I thought I'd still share this tidbit with you for today's link-up.

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How about you guys? Did you get any work done on your BOMs? I'm looking forward to cruising back through the link-ups in weeks when I didn't have time to do that. I really like seeing how you're coming along - it inspires me to keep plugging away on mine.  :D