BOMs Away - A Little Sew Spooky FMQ

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! I got my machine back from the shop last night after 2 weeks. I needed to get my feel for FMQ work back before I dive into working on Helen's quilt (more on that soon). Also, I need more of my basting pins freed up. So I pulled my old BOM, "Sew Spooky," off the storage shelf to do some more work on its quilting.

I got all the FMQ work done for the black thread. LOVED working on the bats. They're just so cute.  :)

I also did the few spots of machine embroidery here and there. 

There are so many spiders on this thing, by the time I was a fourth of the way around with the black stop border, I was jumping any time a thread, lint, or a falling hair touched me!

It's a fun quilt. Too bad I can't let it be on the priority list for a long time.

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It's your turn - - - Let us know if you've done any BOM or QAL work recently!

An InLinkz Link-up

Finish Report - "Miss You! Love, Mom" ~ Dec & Feb

I never did share this project properly. Remember how our daughter, Devon, married Kyle last June? 

You can see there's a uniform involved that has taken them both far from home for some years of adventure. So, for my Christmas present, I gifted them a standing frame and an upcoming set of 12-inch minis done in duplicate so that each of us can hang them in our homes as I send them. 

The initial mini is a completely original design with a cute little snowcouple exchanging gifts in a snow scene.

I've sent them a second mini for February. It has a cute Fox couple that I expanded out of Cynthia Staub's pattern, "Garden Visitor," which I had purchased from her Craftsy shop - Quilt Doodle Designs. 

I drew out a pattern for each one on newsprint paper, and then I used fusible applique techniques. (Tracing my pencil lines with a Sharpie yielded enough bleed-through so that I had a reverso on the back to trace the fusible stuff from.)

The applique was all stitched down simultaneously with the quilting. There's no binding, because I sewed the quilt together initially and turned it inside-out. I'll have to work up a tutorial for that when I do the next one. The stems on the bleeding heart held by the fox for his lady were simply sewn back-and-forth per segment in free-motion mode. The eye beads were actually the second set I'd fished out of my general glass bead container. Got thirsty with the first set in hand, and accidentally popped them down like Tylenol when I also picked up a glass of water!  Heh!

I have 10 more minis worth of fun coming up with this set! Having matching quilts hanging in our homes is a spot of balm on a mom's heart that misses those two young people terribly.  :)  

BOMs Away - Finish Report for "Baekjul Boolgul"

Well, this isn't even a BOM, but I'm still going to post a finish report so I have something to share. Been a bad day after my phone's out-of-the-blue/no-warning-or-options operating system update erased all my photos and wiped everything out of my cloud storage after October files. (Still have no clue why that last part???) That included all my photos of my latest significant finish, which I hadn't posted yet. I finished this around January 6th.

Fortunately, I'd popped a few pics onto Instagram, so I can share a little bit. 

"Baekjul Boolgul"

39" x 42"

original design by me, Lynette Caulkins

This quilt was made for Master Lee, our Taekwondo master. It contains a lot of symbolism relevant to our dojang, including our school-wide motto: "Baekjul Boolgul" - or, basically, "Indomitable Spirit"; the concepts of balance between the elements of air, earth, fire, and water; echoes of decorative architecture on our doors; and the adult belt progression from a new entrant to the level of Master Lee. 

This quilt has an unusual "knife-edge binding" rather then the traditional edge finish. 

I followed the excellent tutorial "Elizabeth's Faced Binding" at She Can Quilt to do that. It was a first for me, as was the incorporation of the 3-D twist panels, which I adapted from the "Twisted" tutorial at Shocking Hocking. 

The Korean words were hand appliqued in January 2015, when I was facing my lymphoma. They say "Baekjul Boolgul," which is our school motto and translates into the idea of Indomitable Spirit - never giving up. The only thing I would like to be different on this quilt is the placement of these elements so that they'd match their positions on the South Korean flag. But when I appliqued them, I had no idea what I was going to do with the blocks. I thought I'd be hanging them in a vertical line. 

Batting was a layer of Hobbs Tuscany Wool on top of a layer of Hobbs 80/20 Heirloom cotton/poly. For the quilting, each belt color was SID'd using my walking foot, and then two lines were run down the middle to make them look like miniatures of the belts we wear. Worked perfectly! I used gros-grain ribbons to add the white and black stripes onto the senior brown and red belts as I did their quilting, white loops of fabric were made for the senior designations on the reds and bodans, and I hand appliqued the gold dan strips onto the black belts. 

Everything else was free-motion quilted - wood grain work in the applique blocks, chrysanthemum fill in the tan framing, and that woven waves look in the gold framing around the twist panels. 

The magenta pink for the backing is reportedly Master Lee's favorite color. Love how it looks with this quilt!

So, even though I pitched an emotional tantrum today and did no BOM work, here's a fun treat to share.

But what about you? Did you do any BOM work this past week or two?

An InLinkz Link-up

BOMS Away - Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day, Everybody!

We are visiting Grandma's & Grandpa, so I have no new BOM work to show (and I'm trying to put the linky up from my phone). If I succeed, show us what you've accomplished with yours lately! I've shared my finished "Miss You! Love, Mom - February" pic above.

An InLinkz Link-up

BOMs Away - "Miss You! Love, Mom" February

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.

Alright!!  How 'bout that Super Bowl game? Huge Bronco following in our area, of course, so that was fun.

Today I got back on track for my normal BOM line-up each week. I got both of my Devon & Kyle minis fused up just as the first quarter was really getting going.

I drew an extension of Cynthia Staub's pattern, "Garden Visitor," which I had purchased from her Craftsy shop - Quilt Doodle Designs. (Her original design is the girl fox with her flowers. I added the boy fox and the bleeding hearts stem.)  It came out so cute, even if you do have to see it in the dark:

Still needs all stitching to be done. Hopefully, I'll have these finished up tomorrow in time to post one to Devon & Kyle. (Hmmm - I'm wondering if I ever showed you the first one that I finished up for their December mini. . .)

And here's a shot of Marissa and her friends before they went out to their senior-year Snowball Dance last night. Good times!! Apropos name, with over a foot of snow still out there on the ground.

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Anyway, Let us know if you've done any BOM or QAL work recently!

An InLinkz Link-up

Flimsy Alert~! Finished my Allietare top!

I'm so excited to have my mystery quilt top finished! Here's my "Allietare"!

I really love how the different fabrics for each color make it sparkle!

I was committed to using my stash and scrap collection. I had hardly anything at all left in the neutrals category, but I did have tons of golds/mustards, so I substituted those into the neutrals spot. That left left a need for something in the golds spot. I had liked the look of the teal in the original button for the mystery, so I decided to go with that. To counter the darker "neutral" color, I lightened the gray constant fabric to a silver. It's actually a completely metallic silver, too, which is neat. This color scheme meant I only needed a few fat quarters of blacks and teals.

It's always a gamble, though, whether your color changes will work in a mystery!  I'm glad these did. As a couple of folks noted, it looks more Spanish this way than Italian, but that's just fine! 

This colorway almost didn't get to emerge. When I had all my blocks made and laid them out - well . . . the effect wasn't floating my boat. I think my brain had developed a certain expectation that was very different from what emerged. 

So I let it marinate overnight after sharing it on Facebook. The little bit of time away, combined with my 18yo liking it a lot, as well as plenty of online folks, changed my perspective, and I decided not to break it into two separate quilts made from the A and the B blocks. I noticed that it felt a little smooshed and busy to my mind's eye with the aqua popping out so prominently amongst other strong colors, and wondered if all it needed was some floating/framing of more golds/mustards to give it the space it needed to breathe.

And wow! Didn't that just do the very trick?!  Laying out my black fabric for the border area and trying reds and aquas in the setting triangle spaces definitely confirmed that this color combo wanted breathing space. I had barely enough left of my golds to pull it off. I also had just enough of my teals left to give the edge a kiss of the aqua effect. I'll buy some more teal yardage for the binding, but it will be quite a while before this can get quilted. I sure wish I could see it completely finished NOW.  :D  

That outer diamond border is a work-up I developed using a bunch of the bonus HSTs I harvested when I made the flying-geese-type units. Whenever I do those in a non-multiples method, I always stitch a double seam so that when I cut the corner off, I get an extra HST to add to my shoebox of those. One day I'll get to play with them, and that's going to be a lot of fun to see what emerges!

In the meantime, I trimmed those babies down so that the finished size is TINY - a mere 1/2 inch! They are tiny, but as long as you trim them with excruciating preciseness, it's not hard to get them to sew up very nicely without losing your points. 

It's also nice if, when you add your setting triangles to each 4-patch, you pay attention and attach them the right way. I put every single one on the 220 units THE WRONG WAY AROUND. 

It took me 4 hours to take them all off without warping my units. Oh, well - it gave me some unplanned movie time. heh!! After that setback, putting together the skinny bricks to make the outer aqua border was a piece of cake! And fortunately my math was all on spot, so everything lies nice and flat despite the shift from on-point bias settings to the straight-grain settings on the gold floater boarder and the aqua outside border. By the way, I did baste all around the outside to protect the many seams along the edge from pulling apart at the edge. 

I really enjoyed this mystery, and look forward to next year's! Thank you, Bonnie! 

You really should see the great variety of finishes that are showing up. Bonnie has a linky where they are being shared - just click on this button:  

Also linking up at Whoop! Whoop!

I'll just leave you with this out-take from the photo op in our back yard. Gotta love a timely snowstorm for quilt pictures!