July End-of-Month Report

July Report

This was a great quilting month. I actually accomplished each of my goals. :)   I'll have to trim my expectations back for August as it will be a more chaotic month. 

Linking to:

    

UFOs - 

✓   Wild Rose Cottage - Make its label, attach a hanging sleeve, and re-mark a cloth quilt bag to deliver it by the 6th for the Denver Capitol Quilt Show!  - - -  I had the best time volunteering at the prep day. Got to see some wonderful quilts as we processed them to be photographed and stacked for installation. Can't WAIT to go up and see the show!!  I really loved this lady's disclaimer on her hanging sleeve:  

 

✓   Devon's Earth Monkey Spinners - Get Devon's first-quilt top sandwiched and at least enough quilting finished to stabilize it. - - -  I actually got the entire center quilted!

✓-   Start working on Kelly's 1930's - make stencils for the two remaining corner wreaths off the ones she had already done, learn how to use the spoon tool - - -   I laid wax paper over the quilted sections that I needed stencils for and oh-so-carefully traced her motifs with a sharpie. Got the rest of the quilt marked, but haven't started using that tool yet.

✓   Put the borders on Heather's Mermaid Fantasy - - - ready for the next stage!  Hmmm - might be a good one to learn trapunto on - great camouflage potential for mistakes. . . 

WIPs/NewFOs- 

✓   Run, Kitty, Run! - bind it, make the label, photo-op, and send it - - - on its way to Florida!

✓   Whoooo's Your Mama? - finish the center and attach the borders

✓   Set Sail - Wash, cut out, prep the center medallion, and sew the HSTs - - - As you can see, I got further than that!

BOMs- 

✓  Get back on schedule with the standard 4 that I use for BOMs Away hosting posts. - - - Great catch-up work. :D  One applique border attached for Ruffled Roses, and every Hello, Moon block embroidered. All up to date!

✓  Dear Jane - finish the blocks for sure!!  yeah!! - - - accomplished!! and a decent start of the assembly.

July NewFO - "Set Sail"

Love Barbara's NewFO parties each month, and they're really helping me get these kits pulled out of stone-cold status and on their way to becoming quilts before my youngest is out of high school.  ;D  Lots of other fun projects emerging, so take a fun breakfast stroll through the other links.

July's NewFO plan was to pull Quilting By the Bay's "Set Sail" kit out of the NETY storage and get it going. And although I've been inundated with blue/white projects this year, this one still floated my boat for a summer UFO focus, so I stuck with the plan. I'm super happy with how far I managed to push this one.

The center row is finished! That's 72 inches so far. It'll be 102" square when it's complete. Even though it'll bleed into August, I want to finish the center field and encase it in the yellow stop-borders to protect all the seam ends from ravelling before I put it away to start on August's NewFO. Besides, being my birthday month, this is the one time this year I get to go SHOPPING!!!!  woohoo! So I don't yet have a projection for August's slot.  


I have 14 more base blocks to assemble, then I can put together the two side panels for the center. 





When it's finished, it'll look like this, except that there was enough fabric for me to add the flying geese on the other sides so that this will be a good size for our king bed:

I had to make 448 HSTs for this sucker.

Fastest way around to do that many with perfect accuracy is to pin the paper pattern to right-sides-together pieces of fabric and sew through all the layers. I cut the fabric pieces with only 3/16 inch leeway around the edges, and it really conserves fabric for you.

Bump your stitch length one notch smaller and tighten the tension a smidge, and you're good to go ZOOMING along the dotted lines.

After you've done that, lay a few out on your cutting mat and slice them all apart on the solid lines. Then watch a fun show while you pop the papers off (which takes far less time on a collection like this than it would take you to size the HSTs after pressing).  

You can get various Triangles-on-a-Roll papers (a nice variety available as you can see at their site - ooo! and a product like Golden Threads paper, too - I have to check that out!) or you can print out HST patterns at Block Central or Quilting and Whatnot (just be CERTAIN your printer is not set to "fit-to-paper"!!)

Not sure when I'll pull this out again and tackle the geese. I should have planned on doing those in the paper-piecing style for less intense work, but I was so focused on cutting the whole quilt out to kit it up for marination after this month's work that I just cut them all out for the 4-in-1 method.  Well, it's probably best that I did that, because although I'm super comfortable now with the paper-piecing method, and am pretty darn good at cutting pieces with minimal fabric waste, there's still a larger margin needed than the 4-in-1, and that wouldn't have let me eke out enough to add the extra sides of geese. So I guess it's all good.  :D

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You should browse through the link-up party at Barbara's - folks have got some super cool NewFO projects going!

And there's more fun at Lee's WIP Wednesday link-up!

BOMs Away - 28 July 2013 - Moons, Janes, Swaps

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 this post.

Got a hodge podge of work done on BOMs this week -

Dear Jane:  WOOHOO~~!!!!   I finished the LAST BLOCKS!!!!

First I finished the embroidery on the signature corner. I finished counting everything on my spreadsheet as it will be in the final assembly to get the total number of pieces (I currently have 5006 sewn together), and I changed "War Time" to "Time of Change" to fit my situation.  The two years I've spent piecing all the squares and triangles have seen great transformations for our family, as the two older kids entered college, we made a cross-country move after 15 years in one home (the longest I've ever lived anywhere) into an entirely different geography and climate, and then the youngest had a custody change which brought her into our home on a primary basis. 

And last, I stitched M-13 together. It really tickled me for this to be the final block I made, as it's called "Lynette's Diamond."  :D

But I'm so antsy to get this all together! So I also put together the 12 sashing rows that I'll need as I assemble my inner blocks:

Hello, Moon: I fused the June cricket and the July camping blocks and got the scribble stitching finished. Still need to embroider all the cute little smileys and details on them.

Block Swap Adventure: Sneak peaks of the two blocks that will start their journey up to Canada tomorrow. 

What did you do on your BOMs this week?  :)

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 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.

TGIFF Link-Up is Here - Run, Kitty, Run! is FINISHED :D

Welcome to this week's landing spot for TGIFF!

It was a clever idea that Laura and M-R had to develop a weekly link-up where the hosting responsibilities are divvied up to lighten the load. And this week it's my turn! If you want to explore  further, here is its mother page: TGIFF.  

(Today's link-up is below my own finish report.)

This finish absolutely thrills me!  Let me present "Run, Kitty, Run!":

The quilting on it represents a huge move forward for me with my Free-Motion skills, and the overall effect came out EXACTLY as I had pictured and hoped. Not so often for that to actually happen!

I wanted a nice marriage of classic with meaningful whimsy, and that's what came through. You see, this quilt is all about my friend, Christi, back in Florida.  I was so impressed with her gargantuan accomplishment of losing something like 180 pounds through sheer determination. She did it ALL by changing her diet and donning the running shoes every single day for a year. Well, she changed herself completely in that year (she's less than half the woman she used to be!), but she's done running or walking (when injuries or sickness demanded a slow-down) every day without fail ever since then. I think it's around 2.5 years now. An amazing feat in my book. She was NOT an exercise gal before whatever launched her into her crusade entered the picture. And she did all that weight loss without any surgery. A M A Z I N G ! ! !

It was phenomenal, and her daily reports on Facebook to us were so compelling, that her example led me to finally get off my duff, grit my teeth, and start power walking daily. (I DETEST running/related effort!!)  Christi's example gave me the impetus to do what I could do - truly pathetic in the beginning, when I could barely wheeze out 15 minutes on the treadmill at 2.0 mph.  My cardio system was in astonishingly bad shape.  I kept at it, bumping up the speed and the time a wee tiny bit every day, until now I normally put in 50 minutes a day, in running/power-walking intervals to net myself just under 4 miles in that time.  Several months ago it was determined I have Lupus, which explains a lot of how badly off I was and why it took so long to get into decent shape. And what a blessing for me that Christi made her journey public and prodded me when she did to work on my cardio health!

The best thing about Christi's example is that even though she ran or walked significantly every day without missing a single one, she was mighty encouraging for anyone who did any amount of effort. Put in a half hour every day all week, you'd get an enthusiastic "YOU ROCK!"  Only did 10 minutes strolling on the 'mill?  You'd get a "Go, Lynette!  Every Step Counts!!"  How can you not join in with that kind of cheering? And every single time I fell off the train and skipped several days or a week, her positive encouragement got me stepping right back on before I backslid too far. 

I will always be immensely grateful for what Christi did for me. The only way I could communicate to her just how much she has impacted my life was to pour myself into a quilt just for her. So I used her favorite color combo of blue and white, pulled in whimsy spots of Hello, Kitty fabric (Christi is nuts for all things Hello, Kitty or Marilyn Monroe), and confused her mightily, I think, when I messaged her that I need a print from her favorite running shoes. 

I love that I was able to quilt those in with just a modicum of simplification of the treads. I did need to downsize them just a bit to fit aesthetically in the white bands. 

This is my first quilt where I successfully rendered feathers. I'm very happy with them - particularly with how the center worked out. I only chalked in the spine lines for all of them. 

I wasn't sure what to do around the shoeprints, but was super happy with the effect of what I finally came up with after doodling on my acrylic sheet over the quilt. 

Quilting pebbles in with a tabletop machine when you have a minky back is a huge workout in itself!  And the thread tends to break, so you really have to go Zen on it and get in your patient zone. But I'm so glad I did them!

And that luscious minky back!! Just look at how rich the quilting looks in it!

With all the fancy quilting I did and hours of tail-tying and tucking (rayon thread on all those prints with 28 different start/stop points each), I couldn't cut corners when it came time to bind this baby. I got it in my head that I really wanted to match the outer edges of the bands, so I alternated the white and blue as I sewed binding on around the quilt. It took much, much longer to hand stitch it down to the back between messing with the minky and slip-stitching all the new color edges closed. But I'm super duper happy with the end result. :D

This quilt's turn-out has made my heart happier than any other quilt I've done myself, and it's soooooo very hard to let go of it. But I can't wait for Christi to get it. She certainly deserves a fantastic warm fuzzy with all the difficulties life has thrown them lately and the enduring positive attitude she's put forward through it all. THANK YOU, CHRISTI!  

And I'm linking this up at Leah Day's Free-Motion Quilting Fridays :D

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So now it's your turn to link up and share your latest finish! Thanks for visiting, and take a moment to stop by some of the other eye candy being shared in the links. It's so nice to cheer each other on in our finishes. :D

BOMs Away - 22 July '13 - Dear Jane

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 this post.

My in-laws dropped in for a few days - not much quilty stuff happening around here. Did get 2 more Janes finished:

Did you get any BOM work done this week?  :)

~*~*~*~*~ 

 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.

BOMs Away - Ruffled Roses Applique Work

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 this post.

This was Ruffled Roses week.  My personal favorite of the current BOMs rotation.  :)   This "month's" work is the 4 applique swag borders with heart-based floral cornerstones. These will each be about 36" long when squared up.

The excess green to be cut away from those cornerstone stems doesn't phase me at all, as I'll be able to use most of the cut-off pieces for leaves.

As I wanted this quilt's applique to be hand done, it's more than a month's work for me. It sits at my sofa-side table and gets work just about each evening as I watch a show with my hubby. Binding and label work bumps it every time, though, so last night was the first time working on it in a week or so. 

I'm a back-baster. You can see the various stages each side is at. I prioritize the top one, but if I finish the amount of prepped work on it, I prep the next stage for it and then move on to the next one. I always let basted pieces marinate at least overnight before doing the needle-turn. It makes the fabric just slip right under along the perforations without any trouble at all. 

I do trim the back away as I work to take away the bulk and improve the drape. Makes a big difference.

This one only needs the other half of the lavender bulbs and then a yellow "berry" in each cup formed. Then I can attach it to the center.  :D

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 So - Have you worked on BOMs or interval projects lately? 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.