BOMs Away - Rabbits & Sapphires

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

Woohoo! My "Down the Rabbit Hole" is all up to date. I hadn't expected to catch up to Sarah's instruction sets until October's. I must say, it's very nice seeing my work station table top again after the three weeks of explosion there during this push. The colors are so pretty, I'm really looking forward to having this quilt available for use on my bed next spring.

Also, Kevin has Clue 3 out for his Sapphire Stars mystery today. I managed to get the navies and neutrals cut out. 

It'll have to wait until next weekend for the rest, though. I have to get myself back on task for my priority quilt and finish the quilting and binding of Fall All Around.

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NOw it's your turn. Have you finished any BOM work done recently?

Kate over at Katie Mae Quilts has joined me in hosting this meet-up,

and linking up from either end puts you on the party at both sides.

50!! Month 5! Eclipse!

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

Check it out! I'm really loving this project.  :D

And guess what?! I'm 50 years old today!!  I think that is the most awesome thing in the world. I am super jazzed to arrive at this superb age and hope to see another awesome age in a decade.

You'll notice that I'm focused solely on my "Down the Rabbit Hole" BOM for now. This point of work catches me up through the Month 5 set of instructions. Two more months to do (with a third coming out in a week and half). When I'm there, I'll go back to rotating through a different BOM for different weeks of the month.

How do you like those mushrooms for a perfect photo accompaniment? They're rather huge (this quilt top is now at 49" square).

Hey - as I was sewing borders on, I wondered if any of you also have "Betweeners" work that you keep alongside your machine? ("Leader-enders" in Bonnie-Hunter-speak)

My Betweeners project right now is making crumb blocks in a blue scheme. 
(Linking this project up at Ad Hoc Improv Quilter party)

Anything blue that is too small to cut a 2.5" square or a 1.5" strip from is kept in a shoebox to my left, and when I need to take my real sewing out of the machine to do the other side or the next stage, I grab a couple little scraps (or amalgamation of scraps like you see here) and whip them through so I never have tails to deal with in my "real" sewing unless I'm changing thread color. If a scrap is sewn to another color, I let that work its way into my blocks, like this cream here that was attached to a sparkly sky blue that was cut out from behind an old applique project.

So far I have about 35  4.5 inch blocks. I work my scraps up until I have a sheet maybe 10 x 18 inches, and then cut several blocks out and pin them on my working board. When they fill the upper area, I group them into 10s so I can keep track of how many there are. And the scraps that come from cutting the blocks out - those go right back in that shoebox for more "mud play." It's fun, it's mindless, it's fast, and in the long term it results in something cool from nothing.

I have a neat plan for them and some yardage in my stash when I have about 3 times that many blocks and enough to make a 2.5 inch all-around border. 

"Blueberry Crumb Cake"


(Never fear - crumb-size scraps in other colors aren't thrown out, but those live sorted into the other color bins in my storage until I'm finished with blues.)


Hopefully this post will go off the way it's supposed to. I've got it pre-made and auto-set, as we're taking off at 3am today to go to Scott's parents' to have a mini-reunion Eclipse Viewing Party. They live 6 hours away, smack dab in the middle of the path of totality. Another thing I'm really jazzed about right now.

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So, if everything works out properly, it's you're turn! 

Did you get some BOM work done recently?

Kate over at Katie Mae Quilts has joined me in hosting this meet-up,

and linking up from either end puts you on the party at both sides.

Pets on Quilts 2017 - Cats with ATTITUDE on quilts (entry 2)

"You may NOT take this quilt!"

Isabeau is a funny girl. She's a ragdoll kitty, but she was born with a crooked eye, so she's super neurotic and won't let anyone touch her. Or even look at her. 

But boy, does she love this quilt. (Good thing for her, it's Scott's and lives here at the house.) Any time it is laying out she wants on it. (This quilt's story was posted here.)

Clara wanted on it, too, but was only allowed to squeeze onto an edge.

Navarre, for once, left off with pestering Isabeau about something she wanted to claim, and he waited for the next priority project.

"Why are there only DOGS? Where are the MEs?"

Although, guess who decided she wanted this quilt, too?!

(That quilt was featured in my other Pets on Quilts entry, posted here.)

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Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

This awesome show's link-up is open through the weekend, so there's still time for you to make an entry or two~!

Pets On Quilts 2017 - "Lori & Aliya" (entry 1)

Pets on Quilts is one of my all-time favorite quilt shows!  
I'm entering this quilt into the "Pet-themed Quilted Project" category

And it gives me the perfect opportunity to put together an overdue Finish Report for one of my absolute favorite quilts:

"Lori & Aliya"

This quilt, after washing and blocking, measures 55 x 55 inches.

It has all-cotton top fabrics, a Minky back, and Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting. Everything was prewashed, including the batting, to minimize shrinkage. I re-engineered the construction of Jenny Pedigo's "Metro Hoop" pattern to produce an unpieced ring center for the cameos.

I finished this quilt about 5 weeks ago. It has been a long labor of love for a super good friend from our Florida days. The top was made in 2014, and for various reasons on both ends, it got put on standby a few times. This year when it entered the priority queue, it took many weeks of intense free-motion work to get it all quilted up on my domestic Viking Sapphire. 

I'm in Colorado now, and Lori's in Kentucky. But while we were still in Florida, Lori and I enjoyed tea and dinner and a DVD together at my place every Thursday night after she got off work.

Lori commissioned this quilt to feature cameos of her super-duper awesome canine bestie, Aliya. I like the way this filter choice showcases the portraits: 

I worked hard to develop quilting templates from favorite photos that would reflect her pretty German Shepherd-ness and hopefully capture her personality while working effectively with the way quilting makes fabric puff and flatten. (That process was blogged here.)

 

Lots of detail work happened in those cameos! I can't tell you how many hours were spent tying and tucking tails! It took many sessions of watching movies, that I distinctly remember.

When I asked Lori what kind of quilting she wanted other than the cameos, she said she wanted traditional feathers, bones, and dog paws. My quilter brain was reeling - "Waaa!!  How on EARTH can you put all that together on a modern ring design and have a semblance of cohesiveness?"

But you know how your brain works away at things in the background, and then you wake up at 2:30 am with an "Aha!" moment? Yeah, that happened with this quilt, and when I pulled out my plexiglass oversheet to be able to doodle on top of the quilt, some play time with dry-erase markers teased out the design that would work.

I can quilt a lot prettier than I can draw! Go figure.

And the execution of the idea was a huge success. 

I love so much how Minky backing showcases quilting work:

Wait, I said earlier that this was all free-motion work, but I did use my walking foot to stabilize the whole quilt with stitch-in-ditch and echo lines around the arcs before I started the real work.

I used Aurifil 50wt threads in matching colors everywhere, except the portraits got a subtly variegated King Tut 40wt to stand out, and the paws got a gray contrast Aurifil. (Note: cotton threads can be problematic with Minky backings, as it sometimes grasps the "fur" and pulls fibers through to the front a bit. This will show when the thread is a different color from the Minky. In future I'll stick with slicker fibers for this backing.)

Stitching the binding down on this quilt was a little interesting, as my stitching hand was in an immobilizer due to a bit of a boxer's break that I got when I did a knife hand power break incorrectly while practicing for a Taekwondo tournament.

Aliya loves cats, which is good, because my boy Navarre loved this quilt, and I didn't have to confine myself always to the only room that is cat free.

My kitty was very helpful during some of the prep stages, offering paw marking aid. . . 

(No, Navarre, we're using Aliya's paw!)

. . . and suggesting I include his adorable otter pose in the design. . .

. . . REALLY suggesting I use that pose. . . 

He's a constant photo bomber on indoor shots, my funny little friend (as you can see here with one of my Fiesta Mexico blocks).

Poor boy cries and cries at the screen door now that I have a longarm in its own room that's kept cat-free, but that's for another post of its own.  :D

"Lori & Aliya" was the last quilt to be finished on my domestic machine, which adds to its specialness for me. Thanks for letting me share it in a special venue.

The show link-up is active for a couple more days, so you have time to get a post together if you want to participate this year. 

Huge thanks to Snoodles at Lily Pad Quilting for coordinating this every year. I know it has to be an enormous amount of work.

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Linking Up:

Pets On Quilts 2017 at Lily Pad Quilting

TGIFF at A Quarter Inch from the Edge

BOMs Away - "Down the Rabbit Hole" in earnest, and an easy applique prepping tip

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

I made good headway on the catch-up work of this project.

First I finished all the leaves, got that first stop-border sewn on, trimmed out all the large areas of backgound behind the applique, and got my middle rabbit circle appliqued down:

That finishes all the Part 3 work.  :D

And then I got a huge chunk of Part 4 squared away:

All the rows of houses are sewn together, and I made the windows and rabbit applique that I wanted. They're all ready to be stitched down.

(Yes, if you're familiar with Sarah Fielke's project, I've done these with a different technique than her plan calls for. I pieced whole blocks for each house into a long line, pressed under the roof lines, and then appliqued the roofs onto the background fabric. I cut away the background behind the houses and pinned the rows onto fresh strips of blank newsprint paper for stabilizer when I stitch the windows down.)

Those windows are 1/2" squares. I had anticipated that they'd give me trouble and get all wiggly since they're a little bit small. But they were a SNAP!

Applique Prepping Tip for small squares:

The big secret for easy handling and nice, straight and even edges is a hefty dose of starch.

All I did was cut out 1" strips from some scraps of cloud sky fabric, then I starched and pressed those twice, so that they had a feel that was almost like a stiff paper. 

At that point, it was super easy to fold over 1/4" along each long edge and iron those down. There was no difficulty with wriggling thin strips or wavy edges as I pressed.

See how nice and straight it works up?  After that, I cut these strips into 1" segments. 

To turn those into the squares, I did not actually need my handy applique-pointer pressing tool, because the stiffness of the fabric let me finger-press the sides under to make the final square. I just gave those a last press with my little craft iron, and they were ready for a dot of glue and a push into place.

I'm a little tired of houses at the moment, so we'll just let this glue dry overnight and I'll start stitching windows down this week as I get free time.

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But what about you?! Did you get some BOM work done recently?

Kate over at Katie Mae Quilts has joined me in hosting this meet-up,

and linking up from either end puts you on the party at both sides.

BOMs Away - Let's dig our way up out of this Rabbit Hole!

Welcome to the link-up for BOMs Away Mondays!

Where we share what we're doing on a BOM-type project 

so they don't stall out in UFO-land!

(Linky at the bottom.)

I found my craft iron again! Although, I could swear in court it was not where I finally found it two days ago when I was searching for it three months ago to work on all those little leaves for Part 3 of "Down the Rabbit Hole". So now my BOM goal is to get this one caught up to Sarah Fielke's schedule by Halloween.

Today I managed to get right at 2/3 of those finicky little buggars prepped and stitched down:

All these leaves are reinforcing mightily that the freezer paper method is not my favorite applique process. I almost always highly prefer back-basting, but this is the approach that works best in this particular task, so I can move them all around a lot before machine stitching. 

I had to run to the grocery store for more freezer paper to start on these - stood in the aisle looking up at the shelf and said out loud, "Oh, cool!" when I saw the printing on the boxes:

What can I say? Little things make my day.

:D

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How are things going on your end? Did you work on your BOMs recently?

Kate is literally in the process of moving cross-country right now, 

so we're going to completely understand if the link doesn't go up on her end 

at Katie Mae Quilts.

Update on progress for the 17 in 2017 Challenge

I have not been consistent at all in blogging my 17 in 2017 UFO progress. I'm intending to get back on schedule with those monthly linkies, as it really helps me refrain from shoving less-favorite and non-priority projects back into long term storage.

At the beginning of the year, I'd listed 17 particular UFOs for attention this year - some intended to be finished completely, others just "required" to be moved along to the next significant stage. 

So far I've scored 9 projects off of the list, but only two were reported to the challenge:

#1 - "Tootsie & Rumples" - completely finished.  :)

#2 - "Scott's Air Force Retirement Quilt" - from part way quilted to complete finish

(it's huge!)

#3 - "You Must Be Croaking" - from partial blocks to full flimsy status:

  

#4 - "Stepping Stones" - from 8 units paper pieced to all 72 paper pieced:

#5 - "Frog Lily for Marissa" - borders all on:

I took this with me to Estes Park for my personal quilt retreat during Scott's
conference classes.

#6 - "Lori & Aliya" - all finished, and this fantastic girl needs a photo op!!

#7 - "Star Crazy" - all of the blocks are made now, here's the last set:

#8 - "Set Sail" - all those geese made and border on:

(she's a king size!)

and last, but not least:

#9 - "Fall All Around" - full flimsy status, going on the longarm today!

(she's a queen size)

I'm planning on tackling the trapunto work for the Mermaid UFO next, but first I'm quilting up this last one, as I really, REALLY want to get the practice on lining things up before putting "Set Sail" on the longarm so I can get that quilt on my bed before August is finished.

Thank you to Meredithe and Anne for hosting this challenge!!

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Linking up at

Meredithe and Anne's 17 in 2017