Not a BOM! WIP - Semper Fi, Devon & Kyle

It's been a very long time since I've made a post that wasn't for the BOM link-up. It's not that block of the month work is all I ever do anymore. It's just that my "real" quilting work has consisted of the same two projects ever since March or so. 

Except for the week that I used the paper piecing of fireworks blocks for an emotional escape, all my Monday-Friday quilting time is devoted to two priority projects. 

First up: My priority project for finishing is Kyle's Marine Corps quilt, and I should have the quilting done on it today! (It's a large sofa size, something like 70" square.)

The seal in the center got trapunto work, so it has this fabulous dimension.

And don't you love the effect of this gold thread?

I finished the FMQ work on the red bands yesterday. I'm not good enough at feathers yet to do these completely freehand if they need a measured repeat - plus the visual field of working on a desktop machine is too limited to see what you're doing, anyway, in terms of the repeats. So I did make templates in the two border sizes I needed. I made them long enough to be able to find the best centering on each side. 

I traced the outlines, then drew in the waves and some of the feathers. I also drew in the corner treatments. Some day I'll be experienced enough with feather work to do them from just a drawn spine even when I want a uniform repeat. 

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Whenever I need to work upstairs, or want a sanity break and color change, or I'm sitting down to watch an evening show with Scott, I work on Devon and Kyle's wedding quilt top. I've never shown it as a whole yet, and people keep asking, so here it is so far:

There are 11 swallows left for hand applique work, and then I'll start the marking process for its quilting. (I'm using the back basting method on these - my favorite - and it takes me about 90 minutes to work around one bird. I take tiny stitches, and I work perhaps a little slowly as I'm watching a movie or show while doing so). 

The top is SUPER WRINKLED right now because it lives on my sofa for easy pick-up whenever a working moment arrives. You can see my hand-work bag living with it.  Oh, and the super-soft plush throw lives on the sofa, too, despite it being high summer because that successfully keeps the cat from wanting to lay on my quilt work. (And this photo is true to its colors):

I haven't yet figured out the exact quilting strategy for this quilt, but it's going to be quite detailed. I hope to have it completely finished when Devon moves out to Virginia in October. Kyle just finished his Combat Training and is at his MOS school now. That lasts until April. That unit's commander won't allow them to live in married housing (he's in one of the intelligence jobs), but doesn't mind the spouses living nearby. So she'll be boarding with a high school friend of mine out there as soon as she finishes her own school program here. I'm glad she's been living with us while his training didn't allow them to be together, instead of living all alone! 

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So that's my Mon-Fri work, the real meat of my quilting time. Weekends are for mental breaks. If I have time on Saturdays I work on a UFO, or community service sewing, or whatever floats my boat. On Sundays, I work on whichever BOM is meant for that week. Sometimes I get in 15 minutes because of fun family activities, other times I get several hours. It just all depends.  :D

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Linking up at WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, WIPs Be Gone

BOMs Away - Wind in the Whiskers

Oops - sorry 'bout that. I fixed the link-up so it's open now.

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.

Wow! This was a very productive BOM weekend for me. If you've ever worked on a McKenna Ryan quilt, you'll understand.

First I quilted up "Tweedle Dum" from my old Sea Breeze UFO set. So he's up on the wall now, waiting for the rest of those to be quilted and then I'll have the whole set mounted on canvas frames. That'll eliminate the waves on the sides of these. The dolphin has a trapunto layer. Even that wasn't enough, though, to fill him out completely against the stiffness of the fusible. I use a lightweight product, but these minis were put together before I started "gutting" the pieces of fusible stuff before ironing it to my construction fabrics. It really makes a huge difference in the quilt's stiffness factor. That wrinkle in the tail area pulls out, though, when the piece is stretched, so the canvas frame mount will take care of that, too.

Then I made the mini quilt for the clothes line that'll go on block 1 of Wind in the Whiskers. This thing is about 6.5" across. I find it super difficult to free motion quilt things this tiny - there's nothing to really hold on to while you're working!

And THEN I spent all day today getting the pieces for block 2 placed onto the right fabrics, fused, cut out (that took 2 movies!), and assembled. I even top-stitched the wings for the 3D butterfly. This block is 26" tall, I think it was. And the colors are a lot prettier in daylight.

Don't you love that Siamese? And the wee little bird? I don't love all those flowers. Too many finicky pieces to cut oh-so-carefully - cramped my hand up fiercely. I'll love them a few months from now. (At least until it's time to top-stitch/quilt all those pieces. . . ;D   

And somewhere after cutting all those pieces out and before assembling them, I did what I should have done right off the bat, and cut out the backgrounds for the rest of the blocks so I won't mess up when placing little pieces for early blocks that use those same fabrics and cut myself short for later blocks' backgrounds.

It sure felt good to get back in my groove after several months getting set by the wayside for the wedding and all! This finished a full month of BOM work as it's supposed to happen.

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Did you work on your BOMs?  Go ahead and share so we can keep each other motivated to keep them from stalling out.  :D

BOMs Away - Americana & Belt Day!

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.

How was your weekend? Mine was fun. We had our next belt test on Saturday - we're at brown belt now, with Devon one cycle higher at brown senior. 

We were approved to sponsor one of the incoming cadets at the Air Force Academy. That means we can take him off base with us if he has liberty (free time) approved. He's in basic training right now, and they get the one day of liberty if they have a sponsor. So we checked him out for Doolie Day Out, and he came to our testing with us.  Fun thing - his name sparked a question from me that I couldn't resist, and he grinned and told me, yes he is actually related to the creator of Star Trek. His grandfather was Gene's cousin. Bunch of nerds in our family, so we loved that trivia of his. Sure was soothing to have him with us all day while we miss our own young military man - particularly this week after the attack that killed 4 Marines and a Navy man on home soil stunned us all.

That hit to the equilibrium also made me dump my regular schedule for BOM work. Instead of working on Garden Friends, I focused on my patriotic project and finished the rest of the paper-pieced fireworks blocks for the Americana QAL.

I had fun playing with the various scraps in my bin for these. I had lots of those dark blue scraps, so I could keep the sky pieces the same for some uniformity, while all the other parts vary for each block. 

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Did you work on your BOMs?  Go ahead and share so we can keep each other motivated to keep them from stalling out.  :D

BOMs Away - Star Crazy, DOD Americana, & a New Household Friend

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! Today I worked on my Star Crazy BOM. I got the Month 3 blocks sewn, 

along with the extra HSTs for the border work later on.

I also did all the HSTs for Month 4, so maybe I'll get 2 months of blocks finished in August.

Then I put together the first of my fireworks blocks for the DOD Americana BOM. Yes . . . I did, indeed, let myself get sucked into another BOM. But we've been an active duty Air Force family for 26 years, and I haven't yet made an Americana quilt other than the Quilts of Valor that I've sent away, so don't you think it was appropriate that I cave in to this one?  ;D

By the way, this just barely started, so you can get in on it also, and she's also running a nice spring-time BOM as well. This is one of those set-ups where you get the emerging patterns for free each month if you show that you made the block in the month the pattern came out. Later on, you can buy the patterns.

And. . . just for giggles: Meet our new household friend. He seems to be named "Wally" now.

How can you not smile at that?  (Yes, the mouth was Sharpied onto the label.) Penney's was having a most excellent sale yesterday, and our old one smokes when you use it.

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So, did you get any work done on your BOMs?  Go ahead and share so we can keep each other motivated to keep them from stalling out.  :D

Finish Along - Quarter 3 Goal Post, getting back on track

It's that time - if you're participating, don't forget to make a Third Quarter "goal" sheet. The 2015 quarterly Finish-Along is hosted by Adrianne over at "On the Windy Side."

Quarter 2 was not productive at all for me in terms of finishes. In fact, I only had one little UFO finish on June 30th, which I never even recorded until now. That was the mini, "Twinkletoes" from my Sea Breeze collection of tops.

It's really hard to photograph the dimensionality of this one. The octopus has some great trapunto behind him:

Our big accomplishment was Devon and Kyle's wedding on June 14th. 

It was a perfect day, but ~WOWZA~ what a ride getting there! I am not a good party planner to begin with, and this at-home garden wedding was complicated by the fact that we could not actually count on the date until within 2 weeks of the event! The groom was at Basic Training for the Marine Corps. This is 13 weeks long, and is notorious for recruits getting bumped back to later finish dates because of anything from pneumonia to sprained ankles, severe pink eye, failed tests or rifle qualification, or even broken bones. So you can't bank on their graduation date until about 12 days before it will actually happen! They then have 10 days off before they report back for the rest of their training sequence before they go to their assigned job. It behooves couples to get married during that break instead of after Combat Training, because they want to get their first fleet assignment (which comes during combat training) as a married Marine, not a single Marine. Who wants that first 3-year assignment to be unaccompanied?? So, we dealt the best we could with the challenge of a possible date change. In the end, it all came off as planned, and even the anomalous weather we've had this spring/summer - weeks and weeks on end of hail every single day - defied that day's forecast to give us a perfect wedding afternoon/evening. 

Three weeks out from their Big Day, I'm almost back to my normal routines. Which includes planning my quilting tracks.  :)

1. Devon & Kyle: 

First in priority is finishing the wedding quilt and the Marine Corps quilt. I'm almost finished hand appliqueing the second half of the ribbons and birds on Devon & Kyle's double wedding ring quilt border. I may or may not get to report this as a complete finish by quarter's end, as the quilting will be highly detailed heirloom intensity, and I only have a tabletop machine.

(super wrinkled since it lives bundled on the back of my sofa for stitching times)

2. Semper Fi, Combass:

Kyle's Marine Corps quilt will definitely be finished by August 31st. :)  Just need to do the detail quilting in the red bands and some background fillers around the stars and in the center medallion. I took it with us to his graduation in San Diego, and was actually astonished that a partially-quilted project with some 500 safety pins in it inside my carry-on did not cue off a hands-on search through airport security. 

(Not spread flat because Navarre thinks this is his, and leaps onto it the second I lay it out anywhere. . . crazy cat!!)

3-7. Sea Breeze minis - These flimsies need finishing  **UFOs**

"Tweedle Dum"

(this shot is an ordering pic for the pattern - not my finished top)

"The Nerdles"

Maybe even "Tootsie and Rumples" or  "The Doodles"

or even "The Clampetts"

I would LOVE to get these two quilted for myself:

Modernology

and 

Rainbow Jane

And if I win the lottery (difficult, since I never buy tickets), I'll send these out for quilting:

Daisy, Daisy

Starry-Eyed Over Grand Illusion

Holiday Tidings

Or any of the other quilts named on my sidebar UFO list, particularly Kelly's projects.

Lots of big dreaming there in that line-up!!  Truthfully, I'll be happy with 2 finishes and thrilled with 3.

BOMs Away - 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.

It has been a very, very long time since I've worked on Kelly's BOM quilt! Finally, though, I had a first-Sunday without wedding prep or activities, so I pulled it back out and did the quilting on the July-August-September row and its frames. It's all free motion on my table-top machine.

Fun crops:  The fireworks in July. Last night, as Devon and I were watching a show, a neighbor set off some beautiful (and highly illegal) fireworks that were perfectly framed in our picture window. You'd almost think we ordered them up special for our own enjoyment! 

Too bad I didn't have dark sparkly thread for this part.

I had fun putting in atypical wave reflection lines in the August sky. It works in the whole block's context. :)

And September's science-nerd schoolboy under the swing tree - Kelly's son, Brady, ought to get a kick out of him. (I'll be sending this quilt to him.)

If you've "known" me for a while, you already know that my first-Sunday BOM time is spent working on my cousin's UFOs (most of which were BOMs, anyway). She was like a sister to me, and died very young at 46 from a heart condition. So these are nice days for me to reminisce about Kelly as I work on her projects.

And then I came upstairs and saw how nicely the delphiniums have broken out over the last two days!

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How about you? Did you get any work done on your BOMs? I really like seeing how you're coming along - it inspires me to keep plugging away on mine.  :D