Flimsy Alert! ~ "Fancy Me a Rainbow"

Hi there! I got my rainbow top put together a few days ago! To say I love it is an understatement, and it takes all my discipline to bag everything I'm supposed to get finished right now (including a commission) so I can just quilt this up Right Now.  :)

It's something like 60 x 65 inches. I t's an original design that I developed by playing around with colored pencils and graph paper to maximize a fat eight bundle of "Fancy" that my daughter gave me for Christmas. I coupled it with a low-volume text fabric from a Wizard of Oz collection and a fat quarter of gray that was in my stash.

 I'll be working up a pattern when I can get some more settlement to my days in a couple of weeks (a lot going on in the background of Life at the moment).

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Linking up at:

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

TGIFF is at Devoted Quilter this week
 (main site here)

WIP - Problem-solving Jovial Trees

New work is up at my sewing desk today!  I'm finishing up the Christmas-time backup in my intended schedule with this last holiday top that I want finished this winter.

The Jovial Trees pattern gives you a top with 3D pinwheels and trees that will stand free of the background after quilting. But as I was working on my border, I became concerned that these pockets will prove problematic in a throw-around sofa cuddler. See how big they are? (That's a large Aurifil spool.) All those spots are just begging for a foot to get in there and pull some nasty rips at the corners of the trees.

So I decided to do something about it, but I didn't want to completely negate the extra fabric involved in the construction.

Voila! Cathedral Window "finishing" to the rescue! I simply rolled back the edge with its easy-flowing bias orientation and used a blanket stitch selection to quilt it down like this:

I think you can see that it leaves quite a bit of dimensionality to the trees. They'll look great with those pinwheels, and feet won't accidentally tear the quilt up during everyday snuggling!

~~~

Linking up at Monday Makers, WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, WIPs Be Gone, and Pet Project Show.

BOMs Away - Wind in the Whiskers

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.

Hi, there! It's a Wind in the Whiskers week for my BOMs. I got the back horizon elements all put in and the main fields attached to each other for the rest of the block's background. (The whole block will be 30x28 in.)

This is by far the most exacting fusibles quilt I've worked on! Just sayin'.  Sure is going to be gorgeous, though. 'Specially when I can photo op it during good daylight.  ;D

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So, it's your turn - have you worked on any of your BOMs this week?

Flimsy Alert! ~ "Starry Eyed Over Bonnie's Grand Illusion"

Woohoo!  I finished my quilt top Tuesday night, but a snowstorm kept me from getting photos until now. 

I was so excited to participate in Bonnie Hunter's mystery this winter after watching 5 others roll by without me! With so much on my backlist, I did limit myself strictly to stash-only, and it happened that I had all the colors in her scheme.

So I happily followed along, knowing that I would do most of the work AFTER the holidays instead of with the clue-reveal pace. And now I have my top finished!

You can see that I changed things up. I did all the patches according to Bonnie's plan, but the values of the greens I went with for the checkerboards weren't so great with her assembly.

Bonnie's Grand Illusion quilt, and many peoples' who have finished her design as it is, just shimmers - I totally see the "Illusion" part of the name. It's like a mirage. And I really like that.

But my yellow was not perky enough to stand against the strong emerald/Christmas greens I used. Instead of shimmering, when I laid a large section of Bonnie's design out on the floor, it laughed maniacally at me - like Heath Ledger doing the Joker! Seriously. So I set aside the green checker blocks, which will look AWESOME in either a March green-and-white quilt or put together with white and red for a Christmas quilt. That's for some other time, though.

So I dusted off my EQ program and worked up a design to use all my other Grand Illusion pieces. I decided I wanted to pull green back in somehow since it's an integral part of the first Bonnie mystery I've done. I went through my stash again and found better greens. But I didn't have the heart to work that whole Clue 3 again, nor do I have a good variety of that kind of green to make the scrappy look up that the rest of my quilt has. That's OK. I rather like the idea that popped into my head to morph this into a derivation of the mystery.

This is 93" x 93" and used all my non-Clue3 patches. The star construction is rearranged as well as the overall design, because I sewed the first couple together WRONG, and then decided to just keep them that way. 

I chose my quilt's name to reflect the fun of watching literally thousands of people around the world eagerly anticipate each clue, passing time excitedly chatting with each other, wondering what and when and how. . . sharing ideas on different ways to attack each clue. It was great fun, and we were all starry-eyed together for several weeks. And I'm thrilled with how a bunch of scraps and left-over yardage and orphaned fabrics in my stash all came together so wonderfully in this quilt top!

Thank you, Bonnie!!

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Linking up at:

Bonnie's Grand Illusion Link-Up

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

TGIFF is at From Bolt to Beauty this week
 (main site here)

Fancy Me A Rainbow

a fat eighth bundle of "Fancy" from my 23yo for Christmas + a little Wizard of Oz text fabric yardage + a fat quarter of gray floating in my stash. . . 

Throw in a little graph paper play, and you get delectable perfection for some Snow Day indulgence!

(**love** the words on this text fabric)

~~~

Linking up at Pink Doxie's Pet Project Show, Monday Makers, WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, and WIPs Be Gone

BOMs Away - Garden Friends, Grand Illusion, & a Visitor

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.

For Third-Sunday I pulled out "Garden Friends" and pieced the last two of the central blocks. I also fused all their applique pieces on:

 And I just pressed the last seam for the center of my Grand Illusion! Give me a couple of days to get all the borders on, and I'll share what I've done with that.

But I had a really great visitor for a good half of the day. This young fellow is the sweetest cat in the world! Clearly not a stray, we took him in while the kids canvassed the neighborhood to see where he was missing from. He's so sweet, though, I think every single person in the family would have been happy to adopt him if necessary. And as you can see, he fit right in with my quilting space, happily laying on various projects and lounging on the desk to watch me work. He even climbed onto my belly when I kicked my feet up to pick out a wayward seam and snoozed for a while. Too bad his human was joyful that he was found!

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Have you worked on any of your BOMs lately?

BOMs Away - Ruffled Roses & Grand Illusion

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.

Woohoo!!!!  

Today Navarre helped me lay out all the piano key swag blocks that I've made over the months for the final piecing of Ruffled Roses.

He was quite helpful!

And after a lot of time working up the floater borders and tiptoeing on eggshells with the iron (felt like it, anyway, working with those pressed-open piano keys!), 

the final round IS ON!

Now all that's left to do is hand stitching the last of the "berries" onto the floater border. And I've already got those made.  :D

Oh - and during the week I finished all the pieces for Grand Illusion. Here's the whole set of 2's:

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Have you worked on your BOMs lately?

Finish Report - "Laurel Burch Christmas"

So here's my last finish of 2014, finally all photographed and written up:

"A Laurel Burch Christmas"

Can you see the snow falling in that photo? Perfect.  :)

And I've got Devon's fiance trained already for quilt photo-opping! He doesn't mind helping out at all, and has a good time doing so.

I love Laurel Burch fabrics - they're so whimsical and vibrant. This was a kit I bought in the summer of 2011, and pieced the top in December 2012 (the pattern is a free download here). It's been in the flimsy closet since then, poor thing!

This was put together with a fine, very soft all-cotton pin-wale Kaufman corduroy backing and "washable" silk batting. It's a much lower loft than wool or poly give, even lower than 80/20 cotton/poly. It's a nice match with the soft corduroy, though. I pre-soaked it, then did my usual partial-dry in the dryer, air-dry to completion approach to get most of its shrinkage out of the way before using it. I'm not sure how I feel about this batting - it dries up quite lacy, and I'm not convinced I'd like it with thinner backing or more open quilting. The top started at 56 x 63", and after quilting, washing, and blocking it to get my marking chalks out when it was finished, it measures 54.5 x 61.75". (I did not use the dryer at all on this finished quilt because of the silk, and I'd say it didn't shrink much more at all since a fair bit of the dimensions difference would have come from the quilting alone.)

I had fun with the quilting. I do that on my domestic table-top machine (Sapphire 875Q), and I pin baste liberally. With my Lupus, I'm extra susceptible to cancers, so I'm not going expose myself to the carcinogenic chemicals in the spray basters (you get that exposure both when you apply it and all the time that you're quilting).

After stabilizing the quilt with ditch stitching along the borders and around each corner tree and ornament, I attacked the borders first. (I used Aurifil 50 wt threads for all but the metallics, and in the bobbins when I used those.)

Those were so easy - I used the walking foot to quilt the divisions between colors, then the spring-action free-motion foot to outline the characters. I didn't start and stop for each character, but came along the bottom line of the color strip and "stepped into" the field at the back of each character to work that one as I work along the strip. Oh - the itty birds in the narrow red strip were not individually outlined.

The word lines in the top and bottom borders got set apart with a metallic gold thread. It's much sparklier than it appears through the camera's eye:

"Magic & Merriment" - so perfectly describes Laurel Burch's work, don't you think?

The corner trees were next, where I used a specialty stitch to make metallic gold garlands, and then I tried my first McTavishing for those backgrounds so that the trees would puff out nicely: 

You can see that better from the back. Obviously I can use some practice with that motif, but I'm not unhappy with the turnout on this quilt.

Then I moved on to the ornaments, where I quilted each type differently from the others, using a silver hologram thread which turned out super sparkly (but the camera can't see that very well at all).

Black kitties got vertical spheroid lines in a snowflake stitch:

White kitties got horizontal lines alternating between a holly stitch and straight stitches:

The purple love-bird ornaments got vertical spheroid lines in lavender thread, with the hologram thread outlining the bird families:

Green deer ornaments got dark green quilting along the swooshy lines in the print, and then hologram outlining on each deer:

And the stags got black outlinings on the "star" of the show, with a hologram fancy-stitch ornament focal outline and straight-stitch horizontal sphere lines. There was one blue stag and a terrific White Stag:

I thought the gold hangers on the ornaments needed a wee touch of something, so I put in a fancy stitch using the same metallic gold thread that I had used when I outlined the word strips in the top and bottom borders.

Last, I tackled the main background, where I put in a free-motion doodle with holly leaves, berries, and ribbon curls:

The pattern called for jumbo rick-rack for the ornament strings, but I'd wanted something more sophisticated for this particular quilt. So I used some of that braided velvet gimping. LOVE it! It was absolutely perfect for this.

But you have to be meticulous while working, because one touch of the hot quilter's iron, and you have this little melted scar forever more. Not going to make me cry, though! It will practically never be found by any of us over the years as we use this.

For the binding, I used the faux-piping technic with a gold accent line inside the same red as the central background:

I love how this quilt turned out! The corduroy makes a really nice weight for winter evenings, and was a request of my husband's back when I pieced it. We didn't get to use it this year, since it wasn't blocked and dried until after Christmas day, and photo-opped after New Year's. But I'm so excited to lovingly stack it with the other two finished Christmas quilts to await full usage for the next holiday season!

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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 Quilt Matters this week
 (main site here)

Don't bother reading - Just a personal post to compare at this time next year :)

If you look in on my blog with any regularity, you know I use it to organize work on my monumental accumulation of UFOs and untouched projects. And I keep track of everything new that I start. I don't want anything to get forgotten under a bed or in closet corners ever again. It may get misplaced in the storage room I have now, but I'll know it's there and needs attention some day!

[Edit]  Oh, goodness! People are reading this - I should know better, I'm that way myself if I see "don't do such-and-such."  So let me put this post in better context. These are the lists that live on my "Horizons" tab, but they constantly change. I just shared the philosophy I have about them with Clare, so I'll paste it in here:    The method I use for my madness can drive some people insane, because it stresses them to see everything right there in print. I suspect that's because it's difficult for some people to operate on the concept of a fluid list meant for ongoing long term forward movement rather than a finite time zone of completion. I made these lists for organization, not for "Finish these immediately! (or even this quarter or year)". I set rotating short-term goals to organize my work time each week, and those are instrumental in keeping my mojo flowing while making forward movement on these lists here. So I consult these about once a month, update them with new stages of work or mark-thru's - but I don't let them rule my quilting life entirely nor stress me out.  :D

After 4 years of attacking 49 actual UFOs and over 100 NETYs [these were an accumulation over 25 years, and about a dozen of the UFOs were my cousin's WIPs that I adopted when she died], here is where I stand. Several months were lost in 2012 due to a cross-country move and living in a rental apartment while selling the old house and finding a new home, and 2014 quilting was seriously slowed down while I finished my thesis and Master's degree. I'm hoping 2015 lets me make huge strides forward like 2013 did.  

The state of affairs at this moment:  (Partial cross-throughs indicate finished to flimsy status)

Primary UFO Firing Range

• 19 and counting down! [start point: 49 in Jan '11]
• Kelly's Strolling the Block (quilting it now)
• Mermaid Fantasy for Heather (apply trapunto)
• BBQ w/ the Squadron (needs quilting)
• Sea Breeze 1-9(stitch,FMQ, frame #1)
• Listen With Your Eyes (paper piece)
• Quiet Rebellion on the Pond (quilting)
• Frog Lily for Marissa(border)
• Hunter's Star Class Piece (piecing)
• Beachwalk (thread painting)
• Hunter's Star the Way I Wanted (piecing)
• 2010 Christmas Exchange (assemble)
• That Cool 2009 Christmas Exchange Quilt (make the drunkard's path blocks)
• Medieval Illumination Coat of Arms (applique)
• Once Upon a Star(thread painting)
• Be Attitudes (quilting)
• Stepping Stones (paper piece)
• Quilt for a Cause: Legacy (assemble patches)
• Scott and Lynette, Still (applique)
• Poor Forgotten Orphan from ~ 1995 (unsandwich)

Those Who Were Rescued and Are Living Full Lives:

(finished quilts that were long-term UFOs)  ~ During this time, I also finished 37 new projects that I allowed myself to indulge in. So I don't restrict myself only to old work!

1. Ode to Mr. Singleton

2. Kelly & Kerry’s Yuckies

3. Kelly’s for Kelson

4. Wagon Wheels West for Dad

5-7. Bama Bound quilts
8. Wheelchair quilt

8. Katie Loves Chris

10. Around the World with Mr. Hernandez – his

11. Around the World with Mr. Hernandez – Heather’s

12. Sailing with the Flying Needles

13. 13 Gags at 11
14. What a Hoot, Devon!

15. Lori’s Irish Butterflies

16. Marissa’s Moment – pillow sham

17. Patriots in Petticoats

18. Unicorn Dreams
19. Wagon Wheels West - mine
20. Synergistic Windmills (Heather's)
21. Marissa's Moment of Caprice
22. Wheelchair Quilt 3
23. Wild Rose Cottage
24. Dragonfly Party 1
25. Dragonfly Party 2
26. Devon's Earth Monkeys
27. Piñata Pizzazz
28. Kelly's 1930's
29. Kelly's Joseph Smith Quilt 1
30. Kelly's Joseph Smith Quilt 2

2012 NEWFO'S - 4 out of 13 still WIPs
                 *(Taken from my NETY storage)    **(Completely from stash)

 *Let's Build a Snowman Dec 2012, needs blanket stitches
 *Laurel Burch Ornaments Dec 2012 & Dec 2014.
**Scoot,Santa! 1 11/2012.
**Scoot, Santa! 2 11/2012.
 *Kashmir Aug 2012, kitted
 *Affairs of the Heart Aug 2012, flimsy
**Hawaiian Etude 7/12-2/13.
 *Coral Encounter Feb 2012, flimsy
   Amaretto Cottage 1/12-3/13.
   Heather's Hearts 1-11 2012.
   Marissa's Hearts 1-11 2012.
   Devon's Hearts 1-3 2012.
   Snowy Day in the Woods 12/11-1/12.

2013 NEWFOs -  14 out of 24 still WIPs
                 *(Taken from my NETY storage)   **(Completely from stash)
         original plans at this post,

 *Martha's Holiday Spin   Dec 2013 - some blocks sewn
 *Holiday Tidings Dec 2013 - flimsy
   Modernology  Dec 2013 - flimsy
 *Plums in November   Nov 2013 -  flimsy
 *Jovial Trees   Oct 2013 -  flimsy (Quilting it now)
 *Climbing Lanterns   Sep 2013 - top sewn, ready for 3D lanterns
   Top Secret: Heather-Bear's Graduation   Sep 2013-May 2014. 
   Circle Dance   Aug 2013, some blocks sewn
   25th, Baby!  Aug 2013 - Oct 2014.
 **Flight Commander   Aug-Sep 2013.
 *Setting Sail   July 2013 - central area finished, needs borders
 *Tuscany Terrace   June 2013 - kitted
 *Chubby Chicks  June 2013 - chicks fused 
  Whoooo's Your Mama?  June 2013 - Flimsy
 *Daisy, Daisy  May 2013 - Flimsy
   Marissa's Restore Innocence Project  Apr 2013.
**Hello, Moon!  Apr 2013 - Flimsy
 *It's a Hoot!  Apr 2013 - Flimsy
**Owl & Pussycat Book Tote  Apr 2013.
 *You Must Be Croaking  Mar 2013 - Frogs pieced
**Baby English 1.0   Feb-Apr 2013.
**5 Valentines  Jan-Feb 2013.
**Run, Kitty, Run!   Jan-Jul 2013.
**Hounds' Blues   Jan 2013.



2014 NEWFOs - 20 out of 23 still WIPs
                 *(Taken from my NETY storage)   **(Completely from stash)   ***(Commission)

             original plans at this post

  **"I Stole the Baby!!" Dec 2014.
  **Bonnie Hunter Grand Illusion Mystery Nov - active mystery

     Sew Spooky Oct  - Flimsy
    Wind in the Whiskers Oct  - current BOM rotation

  **Lily & Blake baby set Oct-Nov 2014.
     Leaded Glass Oct - kitted
   *Garden Friends Oct - current BOM rotation

   *Saltbox Harvest Oct - Flimsy
    T.S. Sep - stealth mode active

     Fireflies In the Meadow Aug - Flimsy

***Lori & Aliya Jul  - Flimsy

     American Picnic Jun - kitted

     Fiesta Mexico Apr - long term hand-work tote project, first block
    Asian Garden Apr - big areas need joining
 **Baby Claridge  Mar-May 2014.
    Boomerang Mar - piecing - needs side strips
   *Sunshine Mar - kitted
     Anna's Mountains  Mar - washed/ironed
   *Simply Fun Feb - kitted
   *Raspberry Lemonade Feb - needs borders

    Bohemia Jan - Flimsy
  *Faceted Jewels Jan - kitted

    String of Pearls Jan - Flimsy




2015 NEWFOs - 
                 *(Taken from my NETY storage)   **(Completely from stash)   ***(Commission)

    Fancy Me a Rainbow [Fabric was a Christmas gift]  - Jan