BOMs Away Monday #19

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays! 

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

I apologize for this going up late - been out of town and having massive computer problems. No pictures getting put in today, although I did get a BOM block done for Wild Rose Cottage. (yay!)

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What interval project have you got going? Weeklies are welcome along with regular projects that you’ve broken into monthly units, and –of course- true BOMs.   Share your eye candy and show off your progress since the last time you linked up! There are some wonderful monthly and weekly projects going on out there. You guys amaze me. :D

My WIP Wed #21 - You Keep Asking Should You Prewash?

Hi, everyone! Let me share my latest prewashing experience with you because your eyes may just POP!


My WIP this week is only the prewashing of some 158 pieces of fabric from my "Listen With Your Eyes" kit for the class in two weeks. 


I have a really bad systemic allergic reaction if I sew on fabrics with the sizing still on them, so I have no choice but to prewash my fabrics. Even from BOM kits and charm packs, which can be a pain because the pieces are too small to go through the washing machine. Let me share what I see fairly frequently when I'm prewashing these little pieces in the sink, and you judge for yourself if you think it might be safest to prewash your quilting fabrics.


Please note, these are all high-quality, premium quilting cottons, not cheaper fabrics that we have more reason to be cautious with.

I use a double sink, washing in almost uncomfortably warm water with Woolite. (I wash my quilts in the machine with cool water with Woolite). I rinse with warm water then cool water. And if I'm using my steel kitchen sink instead of my white porcelain bathroom sinks, I use my giant white mixing bowl to rinse in. This lets me see the color of the water.


So, I just throw all the similar-colored pieces in the cleaning water, work each piece unharshly for a bit, squish out the sudsy water, and toss it in the bowl of fresh water. After all the pieces are in the bowl, I swoosh them around and dump the water.

It'll want a second rinse because of the left-over suds. About 3/4 of the time, that is all it takes, so I can squish the water out of each piece and toss the ball onto the counter while I finish the set, dump the bowl, and then use the bowl to carry the dripping pile of balls to the dryer. (A flick of the wrist with each piece opens it up nicely for the drying process.)


I washed all my greens, saw no real problem, so moved on to the turquoises since I figured they'd be fine in the dryer together. And look what happened!

Here's where you see why I say you can judge for yourself about not prewashing:


These gorgeous, saturated (and remember: top-quality) turquoises are as bad as the worst reds I've encountered for bleeding!

Look at that water~!  I rinsed and I rinsed and I rinsed.  

Now, you can't just look at the water with the fabric in it, because the water "conducts" the color, so you need to lift the pieces out of the water to truly see if the color is in the water or just emanating from the fabric. 

It took 10 good rinses to get to where the dye was no longer seeping into the water.  TEN!
(BTW - Later on, the red set took 5, and the purple set took 7.)

And I could finally carry this double set to the dryer.

And then, of course, I get to iron everything before I can cut anything. But that's just a good excuse to pop in a movie.   ;D


So: One more time - take a look at this water. (I put a white container in the sink so you could see how dense that gorgeous blue dye is in there!) This is not a rare sight with non-pastel colors, particularly from reds, blues, or purples. This is from only about 1 yard's worth of pieces. The fabric sat no longer than 10 minutes in the water. These are all top-quality quilting cottons.

Do you want to trust that the little color catcher you throw in the washer will work as desired and not let any of this color stain the pretty white or pastels that are next to your colors? What if the quilt balls up in areas so that the color catcher can't reach those spots?  


Then you get the problems that I read of on THREE separate blogs the past two weeks where quilting pals experience dye problems when they washed their quilts. It's heartbreaking when it happens, and I would always prewash my fabrics now even if it weren't for my darned allergy.  

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A big "Thank you!" to Lee at Freshly Pieced for hosting WIP Wednesdays 

It really keeps me motivated to keep those UFOs going! (Go check out what everyone else is doing - there are some really neat projects out there!)

Also, Check out my BOMs AWAY Mondays regular link-up.  

This week's stats: (unchanged)

New Projects – (Listen With Your Eyes by Jacqueline deJonge)    

Completed Projects This Week -  0  

In Active Progress - 1    (Listen)

UFO Firing Range - 31.333          

Finishes for 2011 - 24  

Completed tops awaiting quilting:

One charity wheelchair quilt

Center of Marissa’s Moment of Freakishness

Marissa’s Moment Pillowcase panel

Dreamy Unicorns

Wagon Wheels West #2

Be Attitudes

We Love Kelly

Devon's Silk Spinners

Kelly's Thirties Hand Quilter

Kelly's Calico

Poor Forgotten Orphan from 15 Years Ago 

BOMs Away Monday 18 - an apropos swap block

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays! 

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

Not much progress this week other than the monthly swap block for Swap Adventure. My partner for this month is in Texas, and as she just might see this post, y'all only get the same peek she does.  ;D    

Considering today's significance for us in the U.S., this block felt so very apropos.

~*~*~*~

What interval project have you got going? Weeklies are welcome along with regular projects that you’ve broken into monthly units, and –of course- true BOMs.   Share your eye candy and show off your progress since the last time you linked up! There are some wonderful monthly and weekly projects going on out there. You guys amaze me. :D

Vote for my "Hugs and Kisses from Above" baby quilt :D

Oh! I almost forgot!

Remember this baby quilt that I made for my deceased cousin's first grand baby?

Hugs and Kisses from Above

(blogged here)

I entered it in the weekly contest over at The Quilting Gallery.

• My cousin Kelly was more like a sister and she and I had become best-quilting-buds, doing exchanges with each other through the mail and "hanging" out with each other online daily. She passed away two springs ago and will miss the birth of her first grandbaby, which she had anticipated with great longing. Here is a section of the quilt's basic story, taken from it's blog entry a while ago:  this design emerged - some charms patched together at the bottom to represent solid Earth and some green strips swooshing down from above, with X's and O's dropping down the field of the quilt. The quilting extends the idea - vertical waves in the mint swathes, straight verticals in the white to differentiate - with some hearts thrown in for good measure. It's supposed to sort of call up the idea of hugs and kisses raining down on one of those really cool sunshiny rainy days. You know - the kind of sunny sprinkle that prompts folks to say "A widow's getting married!"  

It would be so very cool if you would go and vote for it at this link.  :D
http://quiltinggallery.com/2011/09/09/vote-now-quilts-for-babies/

Voting goes until midnight on Sunday the 11th.

Thanks  :D

WIP Wed #20 - Do you know about newsprint endrolls?

OK, so. . . My summer smash through UFOs came to a screeching halt as I road-tripped last month away taking kids to their school locations and then got shoved into my own studies. So the biggest WIP for me now is actually my "Society and War" masters-level history course.

This was the pile before the final 3 arrived.  Yes: Bleh.

But I'm REALLY GETTING EXCITED now for the 2-day quilt class I have at Quilting By the Bay with Jacqueline deJonge at the end of this month!!  I signed up for it over a year ago. So for quilting, my current WIP is getting all the prepwork done for that class.

Isn't this amazing?

There were several quilts to choose from for the days on which I'm registered. I must have been drunk off of success after the Judy Niemeyer class I did in January, and chose the most advanced for my class days: Listen With Your Eyes.


Well, it's gonna be amazing. HOWEVER, let me warn you - many of the deJonge patterns do not have the papers you actually stitch on, but only have a master copy. This is one of them. (Of course - that's my luck!)  So you have to make your own foundation papers. The instructions suggest tracing each one, but I was not about to do that. My printer does a very good job of copying exactly 100%, thank you!

The masters are full of big black squares, though, and not wanting to waste that much ink, I did trace sections of each checkerboard arch to make copies from. (By the way, you ARE allowed to get photocopies for your own use, but not to share with others. Jacqueline stated in an email to us to make sure, if we're getting copies, that they print out exactly 100%, so there you have it, right there. I did not break any copyright laws by using my printer instead of my pencil.)

Now, here's a tip that can save you LOTS and LOTS of money: Don't Buy Foundation Papers or Fabrics. Use newsprint. You can go to a printing press and ask for an "End Roll".  These are the leftovers on a roll that  won't last the next printing, so they discard them.  Many places will let you have one for free. Mine was a gift from a gentleman in our guild who takes his truck to the printer's and asks for as much as they'll give him for $10. He typically drives away with 7-10 endrolls.

My endroll is 23" wide - perfect for cutting 4 sheets at a time out of a spread such as this.

These suckers have YARDS and YARDS of paper on them still! And it's the perfect weight for paper foundation piecing. (Tutorial about that sewing technique here.)  It's also superb, according to Earnest, for rolling out across a table and letting kiddos go hog wild coloring or painting. Or drawing out a full-size original design and using that for pattern pieces. Or spreading on a work surface to protect from the overspray of basting glue. Or using as an easy tear-away foundation for satin-stitch applique. Versatile stuff!

To use the newsprint with my printer, I needed to cut it into paper sizes. A bit of a pain, but definitely worth the money saved when I used 98 sheets of the stuff! That would have cost quite a bit in "official" foundation paper or fabric.


You do have to be careful and make sure your printer is not set on "fit to page" or any custom size that will give you anything other than an exact replica. And you can't use the fast setting, because the paper's too thin and will slip.


After printing all the duplications for each section out and CAREFULLY slicing the rows apart, according to directions, I finally have this complete set of foundation pieces all ready to go!

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Goodness - it's been so long since I did a WIP post, I forgot to include a link to the party!

A big "Thank you!" to Lee at Freshly Pieced for hosting WIP Wednesdays 

It really keeps me motivated to keep those UFOs going! (Go check out what everyone else is doing - there are some really neat projects out there!)

Also, Check out my BOMs AWAY Mondays regular link-up.  

This week's stats:

New Projects – (Listen With Your Eyes by Jacqueline deJonge)    

Completed Projects This Week -  0  

In Active Progress - 1    (Listen)

UFO Firing Range - 31.333          

Finishes for 2011 - 24  

Completed tops awaiting quilting:

One charity wheelchair quilt

Center of Marissa’s Moment of Freakishness

Marissa’s Moment Pillowcase panel

Dreamy Unicorns

Wagon Wheels West #2

Be Attitudes

We Love Kelly

Devon's Silk Spinners

Kelly's Thirties Hand Quilter

Kelly's Calico

Poor Forgotten Orphan from 15 Years Ago 

BOMs Away Monday 17 - Dear Jane: Can we get rid of the funk, already?!

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays! 

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

I've almost pulled out of my new-empty-nest funk. I haven't managed to get my entire routine up and running, so I'm still not accomplishing more than the week's schoolwork required studies (good thing to have those!) and some tiny smatterings of quilt work. In a couple of days I'll share my experience so far with prep work for Jacquie deJonge class that I have at the end of the month.



The only sewing that's happened is some BOM work and a couple of compassion blocks:


First, I finished 2 from my sidebar list for August to finish half of the list for the month - better than I expected to see.


On Glacier Star, I took the pile of these:

And made a bunch of these (Pretty!):

On Selvages, I did the next-to-the-last month design, two of these. Didn't care a whit that the points don't match up around the center - too blue to fix that, it's staying:

Then I finished the Baby Janes from the August allotment. Now, I broke my rule on this one and started a new project that wasn't "allowed" yet. 

I needed something brand new and fresh to work on to distract myself from my new empty nest.  

Dear Jane seemed like a great project for that -

something that I could be friends with for a couple years and work on in spurts here and there when I'm feeling particularly blue or lonely.

And to fit with the pick-me-up function, I'm doing her in bright rainbows on Bella white along with the Twiddletails crowd.






(Also fixed the mis-placed piece in this older one).










I made two compassion blocks this week. I just need to buy a fine-tip permanent marker to sign them before sending them out across the oceans to Australia. 

Hopefully they will help Amy and Anabelle feel a tiny bit better in the wake of their terrible loss.


Huh.  I got a lot more sewing done this week than I thought!  And that makes me smile.  

~*~*~*~

What interval project have you got going? Weeklies are welcome along with regular projects that you’ve broken into monthly units, and –of course- true BOMs.   Share your eye candy and show off your progress since the last time you linked up! There are some wonderful monthly and weekly projects going on out there. You guys amaze me. :D