BOMs Away - Grand Illusion part 1 & Kelly's Strolling the Block

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.

Fourth-Sundays are supposed to be "Wind in the Whiskers" days, but I didn't have access to the work space area where I normally let that process do its explosion. So I Frankensteined batting pieces together to be able to pin-baste Kelly's "Strolling the Block" quilt.

Also, Bonnie Hunter's 2014 Mystery Quilt: Grand Illusion started up this Friday, and for the first time in 5 years of watching all the fun, I jumped in. It'll slip in with my weekly BOM work over the next couple of months.  Here's the Monday link-up for folks who are participating: 

BONNIE HUNTER'S GRAND ILLUSION MYSTERY QUILT MONDAY LINK-UP 1

I have completely finished 3/5 of the broken dish units, my additional HSTs are set aside for later clues, and the last 2/5 of the broken dishes are halfway finished.

And I think I'll be going with this group of greens, although that middle one is photographing super weird. It does have a more olive tinge than the others, but nothing like the contrast that appears here - actually, that's the same fabric peeking out down in the bottom left corner, and that's what it looks like compared to the others. So strange what the camera does with color sometimes!!

Everything is from stash.  :)

 I have about half of the first-clue units finished. It's been a fun holiday with lots of family time. Quilting work gets interrupted frequently for things like Parcheesi games on top of my cutting mat. (See my Grand Illusion extra HSTs hanging out with the kids?) I'm not complaining! I love the laughter and melodramatic pouting.  :D

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Gearing up for Christmas, now! Let us know if you've done any BOM work lately. 

WIP - Around Thanksgiving. . .

Forgive all my posts this week! Lots of catching up to do, still, and with complete changeovers at all my stations, it's fun to get a day's "snapshot" of what's going on at my quilting stations:

Hand Work Station - Stitching down the binding for my cousin's second Joseph Smith quilt! This will be a most satisfying UFO finish in several ways. 

Quilting Station - I was disappointed that I couldn't get to my "Plums in November" quilt before November is out, but it won't happen now that Thanksgiving is in gear and will occupy the rest of the month. So yesterday Heather helped me pin-baste the Laurel Burch Christmas Ornaments top - it's difficult to stop stroking the Kaufman fine-wale cotton corduroy backing I'm using for it!

Piecing Station - Idle at the moment since I cleared out the two tops in the last post, but not for long! Today I will iron the last of my pinks, and on Friday morning I am ACTUALLY PARTICIPATING in this year's Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt, "Grand Illusion" instead of jealously watching everyone else. Everything is from stash - another dedication this year to no new purchases at all (fabric or thread) for a project. 

And most apropros, I'll be using my new-to-me Featherweight. Its cost was only slightly higher than the repair on my Confidence would have been. It's so incredibly tiny!!! Every one of us was completely charmed by her when she arrived a few days ago, emerging from the excellent packing looking almost like an American Doll's machine! "Little Miss" was made in 1937. She only does straight stitches, but MAN are they perfection. She'll never break, being all metal, and I can service her completely myself as she's a straightforward machine with no computer parts and there are numerous detailed tutorials and videos online, with several places to order parts and supplies from. She needs more oiling and lubing, but will make it through the first day or two of mystery work until the rest of my supplies arrive.

Cutting Station - This week's explosion is getting cleared away immediately following this post, after some paper projects and a mail-delivered Christmas panel project for Heather to do invaded the space where I was trimming edges from leader-ender Boomerang pieces. The risers will also be taken out from under the table leg to prepare for this room's thrice-annual appearance as an actual formal dining room. . . 

. . . And tonight it'll be "risered" right back up again, all ready for my Friday morning gleeful dive into the Grand Illusion Mystery.

I hope all my U.S. quilting peers have a really nice Thanksgiving Day with family or friends!!

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linking up at WIP Wednesday

Flimsy Alert! ~*Happy Thanksgiving*~

Although we're also getting ready for Thanksgiving Day, I've been wrapping up quilt projects that have been out and about in my sewing area.

First, I got this Deb Strain "Saltbox Harvest" kit that I bought in something like 2008 whipped up. LOVE it, with its "Give Thanks" banner!! Won't get quilted until next year, but I'm going to pin it to another quilt so I can hang it up today. Loved putting in those prairie points. It's somewhere in the range of 40 x 50". These colors are surprisingly true:

And I also finished up my "Sew Spooky" BOM quilt! (Thanks so much again, Billie!) It's supposed to have one more border, and I'd already cut that out when I decided I really do prefer it like this, with a black binding (maybe with gray grafted in at the cornerstones) after it's quilted (again - something for next year's fall season!) This is something like 57 x 70" and good, true colors here:

I hope this week finds you well, and if you're in the U.S., enjoying a great Thanksgiving holiday time with your family or loved ones. I am ecstatic to have everybody unexpectedly back home this year living here, plus one fiance in the basement (although I've had to adjust my machine quilting time accordingly), to solidify this house that we moved into two years ago as the family home rather than just "the house Mom & Dad moved to" since it's all the way across the country. I'll have to update this with a family pic that'll get captured on Thanksgiving Day.  :)

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Linking up at:

Fabric Tuesday

Shannon's KISMIF

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

TGIFF is at Persimmon Dreams this week
 (main site here)

BOMs Away - Garden Friends & Nyan Cat

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.

Happy Monday! This week for BOM work, I attacked the applique work on my "Garden Friends" set. The three blocks I pieced last month now look like this, along with the two all-applique blocks. (nothing is stitched down yet)

instead of last month's point:

The B&B block still gets butterflies, but the wings weren't ready to be attached yet. 

They are 3D, but instead of just fabric flaps, I wanted to make them with batting and quilting. I layered the fabric right-sides-together on top of some batting scrap and sewed on the traced line. 

When I cut them out, first I cut the batting as close as possible to the stitches, then the fabric about 3/16 out, with notches cutting to the stitches at the inside angles. 

Flipped them right side out, zig-zagged the body edges shut and flatter, and then quilted them.

I drew lines with the blue water soluble pen, so when I finished making them, they were all damp from being spritzed to erase the marks. They have to be dry to fuse the bodies over them onto the block. That'll be a bit tricky, too, because I used a metallic ribbon thread that will melt if I iron it. I'll have to fussy-fuse them with my tiny Clover craft iron, at least enough to let me be able to blanket stitch the body without losing the wings.  :)

Isabeau loves the box I use for this project SO MUCH - I don't know how she knows it's this box and not another, but she comes running from whatever part of the house to claim it whenever I get it out of the cupboard. Funny girl!

And I have to share: One of Navarre's favorite positions is his "Nyan Cat" pose. Cracks me up the way it looks like he's flying across the sky - and he not only lets us make "poptarts" on him, but he leaves them there quite contentedly. Not sure how he's channeling a cat character he's never seen. . .   ;D

(P.S. - Wow! 6 people and 3 cats can destroy the hallway carpeting in no time flat. It is once again vacuumed nice and clean.)

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So, hey! I hope you have a great Thanksgiving Week if you're here in the U.S., and let us know if you've done any BOM work lately! 

TGIFF Link-Up is Here - A Finished Set for Lily & Blake

Welcome to this week's landing spot for TGIFF!

Quite a while ago, Laura and M-R developed this really clever 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 the program's mother page: TGIFF.  

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

Are you ready to share some finishes? I had such fun with these two quilts. First of all, who doesn't love getting to make a baby quilt for a friend or family member? The occasion is joyous to start with, and the project is small and often quick to finish.

Second, it's been such a treat post-thesis to have hours at a time to devote to quilting work!!

So I give to you: "Lily & Blake"

40 x 55"  and 35 x 41"

Marissa and I love our hairdressers (leaving out their names to protect the children's anonymity). They are a wife and husband team and Hair Artista does Marissa's hair while Hair Artiste does mine. The salon is very much a family affair, with their son Blake sometimes around in the evenings, and their fluffy little dog hanging out at the shop with them. It's great. And Hair Artista has done so much to boost Marissa's self esteem. So we really love them!

When they found they were expecting a baby after years of wanting her, of course the first thing in my mind was: "I'm making you a baby quilt!" I'd thought I'd find out Hair Artista's favorite colors or the colors in Lily's room once we all knew it's a girl.

But then I watched Blake - their son is halfway through elementary school - one day while he was expressing a little bit of uncertainty about what a classmate said about babies breaking all his things. And I knew Blake would have to get a quilt, too. 

I wanted two quilts that were individual, yet somehow connected, so that Blake would have his own thing with just a touch of affinity with his new baby sister.

So I probably cracked Hair Artiste up one day, calling the salon to ask him what Blake's favorite color is. "What it is right now? . . . Hey, Honey, what's Blake's favorite color right now? . . . it's Lynette. . . Yeah, I think so too - (back to me)  Red at the moment. But sometimes Blue." 

OK, so the design process started with "Red". And it all had to come from stash - completely! And it needed to be quick to execute. For the baby quilt, I remembered seeing one ages ago that had a strip of solid between fields of simple patchwork, with an animal holding balloons and the name embroidered. That called to me for Lily's design. I decided to go with a big brother and a little sister for the animal portion. And elephants seemed like the perfect choice - we could make the smaller one hold onto the tail of the bigger one, like the little sister depending on her big brother. And a large elephant would work perfectly as the feature point for a boy's personal quilt. 

So I started by choosing a red fabric to use for the big brother elephant on her quilt.

I'd thought I had a really neat modern pink-based print with good red bits in it that would work for the little sister elephant, but it was nowhere to be found. That was disappointing, but I did find this yellow print that I thought might work. 

Then I had a really difficult time pulling fabrics for the patchwork fields. I ended up "settling" for yellows, peaches, and oranges. But when I got it all together I really loved the blend! And I haven't succeeded at all in getting a shot that shows the true colors. Everything on Lily's quilt shows up a little harsher here than in real life.

The red on the brother elephant is a little starker than I'd like it to be, but a couple of strategies toned the contrast down a bit.  When I satin-stitched it, I used a thread that was a lighter, more salmony red than the print. And instead of a yellow on her elephant, I used a peachy orange. Turned out great. 

For her name, I found an embroidery thread in our collection that was a slightly darker salmony red than the thread I'd used for the applique. I just wrote her name on the fabric with a water-soluble pen and stem-stitched along that. 

The backing is a salmon tone-on-tone that I found lurking in my yardage, but it needed a yellow strip to make it go the distance. I coordinated its placement with the front's white feature strip. Mostly. My math got off somehow, and instead of being vertically centered, the top edges are matched. At least that worked out evenly all the way across. :)

Quilting on the patchwork fields was a simple walking foot endeavor, and I aimed point-to-point across the squares - no need for any marking. I just used a pretty lemon yellow thread I had on hand. 40-weight. I didn't want Aurifil 50-wt for this job - I wanted the heftier strength for lots of laundering, dragging, and tugging to happen with this quilt!

On the feature strip, I used white thread with my floating free-motion foot. I outlined the elephants close to the edges, and bubble-outlined the name. Then I put in some simple vertical lines with leaves thrown on here and there. It's actually an upside-down rendition of a raindrop fmq motif I'd seen on Pinterest. 

I ended up going back and putting in ear and hip lines on the elephants because I didn't like that much area left unquilted. I just used the closest colors of thread I had to the prints.

For the binding, I used what was left of some of the fat quarters in a patchy bias approach. Love it! I'd intended to do it completely by machine like I always do on baby quilts meant for real use, but I forgot to attach it to the back instead of the front. (So I can pull it to the front and make a super neat close top-stitching. I can *never* make machine-finished bindings look perfect stitching in the ditch from the back.) 

So this one actually got hand finished. It should hold up just fine as I use a smaller stitch than most folks do on their bindings, but Hair Artista will know to just give me a holler if it ever needs to be retacked anywhere.

For Blake's quilt, I decided on a simple color-blocking strategy to incorporate both favorite colors with his name appliqued on the bottom and a giant mosaic elephant in the middle.

 First I appliqued the name - used fusible web that I'd cut the centers away from, then satin stitched the letters with a variated gray cotton thread I had.

Then it was time for the main star of his show. This quilt was truly a group effort. I'd asked Marissa to make all the elephant templates for me, so she produced those. Devon and her fiance, Kyle, got the large one traced onto Blake's empty quilt once I'd put the three sections together, and then Devon spent a few hours playing in my scrap bins and Red bin of yardage making the mosaic. She did it differently from what I'd pictured in my mind, but her result is so much better! 

LOVE THIS ELEPHANT!! 

 (It's almost two feet tall.) 

It took me about 2 hours to go back and apply fusible webbing to her pieces, carefully replacing them as I went so it'd all stay in the right place. (I did that by laying 4 fabric pieces at a time from different parts face-up onto a piece of fusible that was lying glue-side up. I cut the fusible close to the edge of the fabric, then covered it with waxed paper so I could iron it together without glue getting onto my iron. Worked like a charm. Then I could cut the fabric pieces along their edges, peel the backing paper off, and lay them back down in position.)

Devon made sure that she used pieces of the print I made the big brother elephant from. (It's on the head, the side, etc.) In the interest of time, I decided on this one to do the applique stitching and quilting in one step together. 

Everything was fused very securely on (and yes, this is stiffer than I usually like my applique - the downside of my approach to putting the mosaic together. Normally I trace a pattern piece on the fusible stuff and cut out the middle portion before applying it to the fabric, so this is fused 100% through the elephant instead of just on fabric edges.)

So after testing on a scrap layering of fabrics and my batting, I applique/quilted with the walking foot, using a medium-width and medium-spaced zig-zag stitch. I used smoky polyester (not nylon!) invisible thread on top, except for an ivory thread for the tusk,

and a red Aurifil 50-wt in the bobbin. Again, worked like a charm.  :D  

Well, the red hides so well on the backing that you can't see the stitches. But you can tell there are zero tension issues - with the fusible in there, no stabilizer was necessary for flat, even-tensioned stitches without fabric puckering.

Next, I quilted the blue areas while the walking foot was on. First I used a soap sliver to draw a bubble line around the letters so I could gage my background quilting, and lines for the fill. For that fill, I just used a wide serpentine stitch that my machine has and put horizontal lines about 1.75" apart, stopping at the bubble outline. 

Then I changed to my floating free motion foot and did the bubble, ran a close edging on the letters, and threw a smiley face into the empty space at the "L". Navy thread, top and bobbin, just plain old Coats' and Clark.

With the floating free-motion foot still on, I grabbed a light gray thread to finish the background around the elephant - had to go to my 50-wt Aurifils for that one, but this would be a denser quilting motif, so I wasn't as concerned about the lighter weight. I thought it might be fun to do a random triangular meander fill, and it sure did work out nicely around the mosiac and contrasting peacefully with the simple wavy lines of the other sections.

I love how the quilting shows a shadow elephant on the backing!

For the binding I used more of the print that the big brother on Lily's quilt was cut from. And this time I remembered to attach it to the back so that I could machine finish it on the front. Happiness.  ;D

I'm so happy with how his quilt turned out. A red mosaic elephant, and blue color blocks - got both of his favorites covered in one design! Perfect red backing, and his name emblazoned big and bold - - - just the thing to celebrate a big brother who may have a little difficulty adjusting to suddenly not being an only child and a new baby who keeps getting lots of presents. I'll make sure Hair Artista knows I completely want him to drag this thing all over the place instead of her trying to keep anything perfect. 

Love this finished set so much! And all from stash - every fabric, batting, and thread in-house = extremely satisfying.  :D

Everything's washed and ready for use!

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So, now it's YOUR turn! Do you have a finish to show off this week?