WIP & NewFO - It's a Hawaiian Dragonfly Party!

Besides my ever-present Baby Janes, I have two WIPs this week.

The main WIP right now is Dragonfly Party #1. This is a very special project because a beloved cousin and I were quilty best-buds, working on our own version of BOMs for each other, when she died. It was devastating, and I couldn't bear working on the project for quite a while. I finished all the feature blocks for both twins maybe 5 months ago and had to put it away to focus my attention on preparing our house for the market. Now this project is finally up on center stage!  At least the first of the twins is.  ;D  

Just about finished assembling the center. I don't know what malicious muse made me think I wanted 1/4" sashing, but there it is. Such a pain! 

Slow work gets good results, though. They're matching up nicely and staying even. I'll soon be on to the border work.  :D 

After months of abstinence due to house-readying and moving across the country, I finally get to participate in Barbara's NewFO fun for July - just squeezing in a new project today!

I've been wanting to try making a Hawaiian quilt for some time now, especially since a high school classmate thought of my love of history and quilting while her family was in Hawaii last year and she couldn't resist ordering a book for me that she saw. I think that deserves a wall-hanging of her own in the style, don't you?

So this morning I printed a freebie pattern from online, except that it won't fit on normal paper. 
Problem-solving: tape several sheets together, draw the square as big as I want it, fold it in eighths in the traditional designing process, and trace the design. My light box came in real handy for that part. 

My box isn't big enough to hold the entire 18" square, so when I wanted to trace the design onto the back of my fabric, I used the good ol' fashioned method of taping everything up on my window. I'm sure the folks in our apartment complex were wondering what the heck I was up to! (and how did I forget to get a snapshot of that stage?)

Once I had the design on the back of my background fabric (I'm a back-basting needle-turner fan, for sure!!), I layered the fabrics face down and pinned like crazy. I've never back-basted anything so large, and wanted to be able to handle it with confidence that nothing would slip. 
So far I've basted the outer frame line. 


This one will be fun and cheery to work on. It'll move pretty slowly for a couple more weeks as I catch up the backlog of my Baby Janes, but ought to pick up after that. 

When I'm finished, it'll look like a simplified version of this:

Only, in this batik:   











In addition to being my first Hawaiian quilt, this will be my first hand-quilting when I get to that stage, so I'm looking forward to the work on this small quilt!

Now head on over to Lee's and take in all the eye candy of what lots of folks are working on.

BOM's Away - 29 July 2012 - A Storage Find and Pike's Peak

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

On Friday evening we went to the storage unit to pull jackets out for a Saturday-morning train ride up to Pike's Peak. Let me journal a few of my favorite picks from that family outing, and then I'll get to the "real" stuff for you.  ;D

If you're ever in Colorado Springs, you really have to take the Cog Train
up to Pike's Peak. It is more than worth the ticket price!

The concept of wearing jeans and jackets in July is COMPLETELY FOREIGN
 to this transplanted Florida family! Back there, this is what we'd wear
for about 3 weeks in our deepest winter days.

On your way up, you see lots of neat forest trees and vistas like this overlooking reservoirs.
Only, the phone shots don't do it half justice for the sheer beauty in real life vision.

You climb fast in this train! The grade is a whopping 25 sometimes!! Normal-track trains would fail at something like a grade of 10. This train runs on the cog track, though. See it in the center? That's the track that the train pulls itself up on with cog gears under the cars. The outer tracks are only for balance. It's rather like some types of roller coasters.

After 70 minutes or so, you break over the timber line, where only arctic tundra grows. 

And you get glimpses of lots of these
funny little Yellow-Bellied Marmots.

The historian in me loves this shot - you can see another train car approaching that ridge in the distance (good for perspective!), but along the bottom portion, meandering up and over from the bottom left corner, you can glimpse the carriage tracks from the late 1800s still showing the ruts even though it hasn't been traveled for ages and ages. That's because tundra only grows 1-3 inches every CENTURY. Makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

After about an hour and a half, you arrive at the peak!

The Caulkins Family on Pike Peak, with Wyoming in the background distance.

Scott loves to scramble to solitary perches. Yeah, it makes me quite nervous at times!

If you're cold or want to shop souvenirs, they have a shop up there with food, drinks, gifts, etc.

Remember those carriage tracks? Well, in 1893 Katharine Lee Bates traveled on them to the peak, where she wrote "America the Beautiful" - inspired by Pike's views and her train trip across the Plains. It was set to music by Samuel Ward, and by the time Katharine died in 1929, it was already the wildly popular national song that remains one of our most beloved to this day. 

But pretty soon you want to ignore the memorial and the shop and get back to gawking at the amazing views. . .

. . . Before you get back on the train and head down that steep, steep track.
Next time, we'll take the train up and bicycle down!

So - on to quilting concerns!  

While we were at the storage unit getting jackets, not toooooo far back, the box for Dragonfly Party was peeking at me! This was the next BOM quilt top I'd wanted to assemble here in the apartment, but had found that only the focus blocks had made it here with me. The quilt is on the waiting list of a popular professional longarmer, and due to come up sometime soon - so I was fretting that I couldn't finish it and would lose my spot.

Haven't had much sewing time since the outing, but I did get all the pieces for the centers sorted out and organized - and nothing was missing! (This is one of two identical twins.)

And after a couple days off from any Dear Jane work, I did get these five blocks finished up this week out of the hand-work tote:

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What have you done lately on your BOMs or interval projects? We'd sure love it if you link up here to show it off! :D   

BOM's Away - 22 July 2012 - 2000, Jane!

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Sometimes I crack me up.  :D


Here are the Jane Babies I finished this week. They were all from my hand-work tote.

You can see that I keep a chart and piece-count for my Rainbow Jane over on my left sidebar. Well, when I entered the piece counts for this week's finishes on the spreadsheet, it told me I was up to 1992 pieces. So tempting to round it up. But yesterday I prepped the next double-set of Babies to work on (the rest of the catch-up, by the way, woohoo!) and right now I am SICK TO DEATH of Jane. 


However, That "1992" just bugged me. It was like it was saying "Neener, neener, neener!" being so close to a perfectly even 2000. So I pulled my Jane Box out of the bureau drawer and fished out all the loose finished Babies.  

Then I gritted my teeth and sewed 8 sashing pieces on (and ONLY 8) so I could get that spreadsheet total to 2000.


Silly me.  :D    But I'm not going to sew anymore Jane stuff today. Machine or hand. She can just cool her jets for a day or two.   Maybe I'll take the family to Batman instead. And a bike ride along Cottonwood Creek Trail. And maybe we'll try some disc golf on that public course along the trail. Oh, wait - Scott says those aren't frisbies they use, but real-live golf discs, which are a little bit different. Maybe we'll have to try that some other day - Something to look forward to.


But, OH!!!!  Thursday morning we suddenly had competing offers come in on our Florida house! I was astonished at how fast it resolved into a contract on the house. So Friday we spent the day looking at the last few houses here on my list and then re-visiting our top two favorites. We put an offer in late that night. Yesterday morning I woke up to find that they had signed our offer with no quibbles!!  I am a Happy Woman.  :D  If all goes well, this will be my new front door on August 22nd:

and I'll be sewing in this basement on August 23rd:

Because let's be real - I'm not waiting until we're all unpacked to do more sewing. . .   ;D

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Have you made progress on any of your BOMs or interval projects? Link up here to show it off! :D    

Another Flimsy Alert!

I'm so excited to finally - finally! - be able to post for TGIFF and Whoop Whoop!

The dust has settled, our Florida home is entering a contract today, and we're happily ensconced in a really pretty apartment complex while we finish one last homes-viewing round before starting our own purchase procedure for a Colorado home, hopefully putting an offer in this evening (exciting!).

I'm in love with the way Colorado Springs nestles against the mountains
with Pike's Peak in the background. That snowcap is gone right now,
having been first muddied and then melted during the nasty fires.

Last Friday I finished my Glacier Star quilt top, but couldn't post for TGIFF because we didn't get photos until Saturday. What a fantastic shot we got, though! Garden of the Gods is a spectacular place to go, and was a very popular place to shoot a quilt. (I wrote about that two posts ago.)  This is a Judy Niemeyer pattern, and I used a fabric kit from Quilting by the Bay in Panama City, FL.

If that isn't fun enough, this morning I got the corners mitered and put in the last stitch on my Coral Encounter. I'm in love.  :)

Didn't we luck out with our Google-based apartment search?
That's a square quilt - wind just wouldn't cooperate!

This quilt is made with the Judy Niemeyer Drunkard's Path paper piecing pattern, but I put the colors together myself to reflect the impression it gave me of a patch of brain coral underwater. It turned out gorgeous, and I plan to have a lot of fun with the quilting once we're into a house and I have real sewing space again.  (not to mention my batting, which is all in a box deeeeeep inside storage)

WIP'n it up - Heading for another top finish this week!

Last week I finished my "Glacier Star" top, and it looks like I'll get my "Coral Encounter" fully assembled this week.  Woohoo!  :D

Laying out the center and border pieces to figure out where to place the rest of the arcs. . .

Setting them all in. . .

And taking off the papers. . .

That'll be 96 of these suckers all together!

Thank you to Lee at Freshly Pieced for hosting WIP Wednesdays.

BOMs Away - Glacier Star visits Garden of the Gods

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Woohoo!  "Glacier Star" is OFF the BOM list! I got this strikingly gorgeous Judy Niemeyer quilt top finished up, and since it's the first flimsy completed here in Colorado, we thought it deserved a really terrific photo-op celebration. Especially since yesterday started out so gorgeous! 

Off we trekked to Garden of the Gods. Let me tell you, this is one of the most beautiful little pockets of geographic amazingness, and it's so accessible - and perfectly FREE! 

The really fun part was the reception the quilt got. I'd talked myself into just doing my thing and not minding one bit if anyone thought it was weird for somebody to be holding up a quilt in a public park (gorgeous Saturday weather = lots of folks out there). I needn't have worried - far from getting odd looks, we actually got at least six requests from random park-goers to please wait long enough for them to get a shot, too!  lol!!

First full-family shot we've been able to get for a long time:

Scott saves Marissa from being crushed!

Sisters have a new clubhouse?

Heather, Devon, and Mariss with the Three Graces and Cathedral Spires formations in the background.

I think this was the Tower of Babel formation behind me and Marissa, but I might be turned around:

 My silly ape man! 

In the midst of all these gorgeous red formations, you have a striking white mount:

The Kissing Camels are a favorite with everyone:

And, look! We found Manfred (from the Ice Age movies):

I'm thrilled with the quilt, bolstered by its public reception, and antsy to get more of my BOMs and UFOs out of the storage unit. Scott says he knows right where those boxes are, too - 18 feet back from the front, behind floor-to-ceiling packed-in obstacles.  :P    Forget that!  I'll just have to be happy with the couple of projects that made it here to the apartment for the next 2 or 3 months!


I'll never run out of Dear Jane work while we're waiting to get a house. A whole slew of Babies finished up this week. Scott loves the F-16 impression they make:

But these two snuck in early this morning for a "Santa" impression, having missed yesterday's "flight" photo op:

That's 10 altogether! A whole month's worth. I'm so excited to have half the catching-up finished now.  We'll see if I can get the other 30 finished before the August fabric shipment!

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Have you made progress on any of your BOMs or interval projects? Link up here to show it off! :D