Finish Report! 2/2 today - "Ocean Songs"

Yes, I have two UFO finishes to report this week! 

This is "Ocean Songs," from my 18 in 2018 list, my Q1 Finish-Along list, and the #8 selection for my March UFO Challenge project. It is a free Laurel Burch pattern, and I used her original fabrics in it.

49 x 48 inches, quilted with Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting.

I had pieced the top in the fall of 2008 - TEN YEARS AGO!   Thank goodness for this challenge. That's 3 UFOs, two of them very long-term, finished so far this year thanks to these challenges.

The central Mermaid, along with the four corner mermaids, all got trapunto work so that their bodies and tails would stand out really nicely. 

It succeeded superbly, but the wonderful saturated colors of Laurel Burch's prints don't let the camera capture the dimension well at all, no matter what I try.

On all the pictorial panels, I simply traced outlines with a tiny smattering of extra arcs or swirls here and there. 

But the side panels presented the same problem I'd encountered in my Bohemia quilt's pinwheel piecing - everything was so busy that the pieced fish really got lost. 

So I chose a strategic quilting approach to help bring them out. First, the pieced fish all got face, scale, and fin/tail features quilted in a 40wt gold Glide. 

Then, I used a blue Microquilter thread to treat all the checkered blocks as a single background, and quilted water lines across them in a way that blends with the waterlines in the seahorse blocks.

It really helped, working maybe another 25% better in the human eye than the camera can share with you.

There are so many fun features in Laurel Burch prints. Some of my favorites other than the mermaids are that wonderful sun, the jaguars and birds, and all the adorable little seahorses.

The green stop borders are so busy, not much quilting would show up, so I tried my hand at some free-style doodled fish inspired by Lori Kennedy in the horizonal bars, and just threw in some seaweed in the verticals.

And on the outer border, I gave up trying to figure out how to render my idea of fish poking up out of the water here and there, and simply followed several wave lines. It really made the fabric look fabulous, so I'm glad I did that! Maybe you can see a little bit of the wonderful transition here:

I had intended to make a faux-piped flange with the ocean fabric and a gold piping, but I didn't have anywhere near enough of that fabric left, nor did I have a good blue to play with that outer border. So I went with an arty, mitered faced binding. 

The clean edge of this style of binding looks fantastic on this quilt, so I'm glad I did that.

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Linking at:

18 in 2018 

TGIFF is at Rebecca's this week
Whoop! Whoop! at Sarah's

2018 Finish-A-Long Q1 Reports at Sandra's

Finish Report! ~ "Fancy Forest"

There was no way I could pass up Elizabeth Hartman's kit, "Fancy Forest," as it's the perfect quilt for us, living under our pondersoa pines!  (This was on my Q1 FinishAlong list)

I mean, look at what I found just lying there while we were taking some shots - 

We get mule deer on our hill and in our yard very often - they like our property for napping stop-overs.

There are actually 7 does in this photo if you like Hide 'n Seek

I pieced the top during spring-summer of 2016, in the same fabrics Elizabeth's was made with from her collections, and then it waited until I got a longarm. It's quite heavy with its linen background fabric and many seams, and I preferred waiting a couple of years to pushing it through my domestic. Plus, I had a Renaissance wedding to sew for the rest of that year.  :)

This is 66.5 x 90 inches after binding; Elizabeth Hartman Pacific collection and probably Kona solids quilting cotton in the features, with Robert Kaufmann linen for the background; Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 preshrunk batting

So this quilt got put onto my 18 in 2018 list - the 18 quilts I most want to finish or advance at least a  stage this year, and this was the number drawn for February's UFO challenge. So onto the frame it went mid-month, and took me 3 weeks to do up its quilting.

I combined my own ideas with influences from three master quilters. 

I loved the all-over bark-work on Elizabeth's original quilt. Here's a photo you can see that on if you click to blow it up - for some reason, I can't find any of the good photos of the original quilting to link to online.

Elizabeth Hartman's quilt

You'll see that idea play out in the background work of mine, with leaves, pinecones, pine needles, and flowers thrown in whenever they felt like happening, because I really liked the way Wendy Iris put elements into her pebbling background. I just winged this part with free-motion work when all the animals' quilting was finished.

My owls, butterflies, and bunny ears are very much like Natalia Bonner's. I wanted a woodsy-artsy vibe to ring out more than modern, though, so I did add some features on the owls' crowns and bottoms, and made faces instead of modern lines for the bunnies. 

My very favorites are the hedgehogs. They were my own idea, inspired by the resin hedgehog Scott gave me for Valentine's, coincidentally on the very day I loaded this quilt. He had no idea what was happening, so once again Quilter's Serendipity landed at my door.  :)  

I also did my own thing with the foxes. . . 

. . . And on the thistle flowers, where I used a curved ruler to try to evoke the spiky ball heads they get:

The backing is from Elizabeth Hartman's Rhoda Ruth collection. It's one of those cool times when colors/styles that are not normally my thing at all COMPLETELY float my boat, and it coordinates wonderfully with the prints from her Pacific collection on the front.

It's also one of the rare times that I've done a single-fabric backing rather than pieced in an interest element using left-overs. Boy, this fabric feels *nice* - even with such dense quilting!

I love the The only thing I wished I'd done differently - and I really should have known better - was to put wool batting in this instead of 80/20, and possibly even double-batted the wool over 80/20. It was so heavy to start with, though, that I decided to go with the lighter batting. But I do like more fill in my custom work - not a fan of the crinkly look except on vintage-style quilts.

I got a fantastic workout with tension adjusting on this! I love thread. I love to use different weights, colors, sheens, types as the ocassion calls for, and custom work on a multi-element quilt like this, with linen background, wanted all these! 

I did not change colors within a given animal or flower, and you can see that I used only 6 bobbin colors/types to the 18 top threads. (Glide and Isacord on the animals, So Fine on the background. MagnaGlides and SuperBobs in the bobbin.) 

I also got a workout on the binding, as I ditched the fabric I'd bought for that with the kit since a scrappy binding just looks amazing on this quilt. Fortunately, one piece cut on the bias from a good many of the leftovers from making the animals gave me plenty to work with:

All those colors, and wanting to control the placement somewhat, sure made for a lot of fussy seams to sew up! (trimming dogears and pressing seams open avoided bulk nicely on this quilt's edge)

But isn't the binding just awesome in execution?  

I love this quilt so much, and it sure was gratifying when I was halfway finished with the background quilting for my 20yo to come in and watch a bit and then say, "PLEASE tell me we're keeping this one, and it's not somebody else's quilt!"  :D

~*~*~

Linking at:

18 in 2018 

TGIFF is at Rebecca's this week
Whoop! Whoop! at Sarah's

2018 Finish-A-Long Q1 Reports at Sandra's

March UFO Challenge Met!

Woohoo!!   My March UFO Challenge is met!

#8 on my list was this super fun Laurel Burch mermaid quilt top, which is now all quilted!

The pattern, by the fabric designer, was free, called "Ocean Songs," and I made it in December 2008. Great UFO save, eh?!

I do still have to bind it and tuck the tails, so a real photo op will come sometime soon, as well as a check-off from my 18 in 2018 list. :D

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I will be linking up at:

Patchwork Times UFO Challenge
March 18 in 2018 page
UFO Busting Party at Tish's

BOMs Away - Forever My Valentine block 2

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.)

The second block of the "Forever My Valentine" BOM arrived a couple days ago, so I put that together today. 

I do like this flannel applique.  :)   And it'll be even better when all is done and the 3D white wool flowers and the pearl beads get added as well.

Have you done any BOM work 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.

What's Stitchin - It's a Geese and Mermaids kind of week

Mornings are up in the air with the geese. 

(Scott's March row quilt and a flannel kit that's been in my storage f o r e v e r)

And afternoons are down in the water with the mermaids and fish of Laurel Burch's fantasy, "Ocean Songs."  (March challenge, UFO #8)

Fun times!

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Linking up at: 

WIP Link-Up at Brook's
UFO Busting Party at Tish's

BOMs Away - Bunny Fiestas in Mexico by the Beehives are a little Nuts!

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.)

This weekend I got all the pieces for the standing bunnies prepped. Tbere are a lot more pieces in this photo than it appears to have!! Hours and hours here, folks. Have I said how much I hate this particular process? But I do greatly prefer a turned edge on my machine applique, so I suck it up and do it.

Next month I'll focus on getting the other components prepped so I can work out the placement on the extra-wide rabbit borders I'm doing for my "Down the Rabbit Hole." I think I'm just going to add birds, maybe a couple clouds, along with the flowers to fill in the extra space my king-sizing the project created with this round.

But I have other bits of BOM progress to report, too. At my hand sewing "station," I finished the fourth outer corner for "Fiesta Mexico" block 6! That sucker is a good square yard, so lots of applique work just for that one block. I didn't feel like trimming the triangles down and sewing them together yet, so it's all well-supported on the wall until the other blocks are appliqued.

And that left me able to whip up the first block for the new "From the Heart" BOM that I signed up for this year. Just in time, as the second one arrived a couple of days ago.

With that out of the stitching tote, I got out my scrap bins and pulled fabrics for the 4 "Classic Nutcrackers" that I had traced out onto their background a few weeks ago. I didn't have to turn to the stash "proper" very often.  :)

I actually got a wee bit of stitching done on the first one. These will be fun. They'll rotate with Fiesta Mexico and Octopus Garden for my long-term hand work. 

How about you? Did you get any BOM work done recently?

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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.

Finish Report! ~ Wonder Woman Postcard mini

I finished my mini quilt for the Elm Street Quilts Postcard Swap. I'll be sharing its story in a couple of weeks. Today it's got a date at the post office.  :)

Linking up at TGIFF - located at Sandra's this week.
and the 2018 Finish-A-Long Q1 Reports at Sandra's, as this was on my Q1 list

This was my March OMG