BOMs Away - From the Heart (and April OMG)

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 finished block 5 for "From the Heart" - 

Block 6 was already prepped and ready to go, but I had the lightbox out for something else, so I traced out the last two applique blocks for this quilt.

 Normally I trace the pattern lightly with a pencil, but this project has a dark background that hides the pencil too much, so I'm using a non-gel pen on these. (Gel ink smears around too much as you're working these up.) Tracing onto a black background gets quite "inventive", but luckily that's a super rare occurence for me.  :)

I do the backbasting technique for 99.9% of my hand applique. Most of the remaining .1% is when I use Kay Buckley's Perfect Circles for making small or medium berries. 

You can use this method for overlapping pieces, tiny pieces, and even intertwining pieces when you're practiced at it.

 The only non-sewing prepwork you do is to trace the picture onto the back of the background fabric. That's it. (No templates to make! No glue to use! No glue to wash out later or to turn brown if you leave your project sitting for three years. . .  I really love this method.) 

~*~

Can you believe it's April?! This is my last full month of Life as we currenly know it, with big changes coming to all of us as Heather graduates next month and then they move away. 

Do you have big changes this spring, too?

I'm adding my April OMG here, because diving into taxes today is going to ruin my brain for remembering to make another post tomorrow. (We will owe this year, thus the late reckoning - anybody who had wanted to fraudulently claim our tax return this year was more than welcome to it). 

Scott's choice of mini quilts got shoved to the wayside when we started remodeling the master suite last year. So this month, I want to get those back on the active slate. My one must-do goal is to finish his Raven's Throne, which was left in this state:

~*~*~

How are things on your end? Did you do any BOM work this week?

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

BOMs Away - The Variety Show

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.)

Hi there! I worked on three different BOMs this week:

Well, this one is a Technique of the Month rather than a Block, but Heather's Dahlia is a finished top - 

And I did the bits of embroidery on my Sew Spooky quilt, then got it loaded and am playing around with detailed custom work (this is my #8 UFO for the APQ challenge) - 

And I've put in a good start on my From the Heart block 5 - 

So, BOMs have been representing at all 3 of my work stations this week! Sewing machine, longarm, and TV sofa.

~*~*~

How are things on your end? Did you do any BOM work this week?

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Whoop! Whoop! ~ Flimsy Alert! Heather's Graduation Dahlia OMG

I'm so excited to be able to share this Whoop! Whoop!

Heather's Dinner Plate Dahlia (the 2019 Niemeyer Technique-of-the-Month) was my March 2019 project for the Elm Street Quilts OMG challenge, but it's a super doozy to piece, and I'd only marked the work for books 1-3 as my goal.

Instead, as you see, I got all the work finished and have a completed quilt top! This baby took right at 100 hours to paper piece and assemble!!!!  <~~~ TGIFF celebration, definitely!

And it lies perfectly flat when it has enough room to do so and doesn't have to span a flooring edge - makes me a very happy quilter for longarming ease!

This finish point makes me incredibly happy, because now there is most likely plenty of time to have it completely finished for her graduation. I'm going to figure out how to get the caduceus, her school initials, and the year into the quilting for her, which I intend to be every bit as intricate as the Ruffled Roses quilting I did in January. I also want to play up the gold tones more with the quilting and threads somehow.

First, a break from this project, though. I'm going to do the bits of embroidery I'd forgotten to do, and then finish up the quilting on my Sew Spooky UFO (the March pull for the American Patchwork & Quilting UFO Challenge, #APQResolution) before I load this baby on the frame.  :)

~*~*~ Linking up at:

Whoop! Whoop! at Sarah's 
TGIFF Thank Goodness It's Finished Fridays at Kathy's
One Monthly Goal (OMG) at Elm Street Quilts

BOMs Away - Dahlia Emergence

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 is getting close! A good bit of the assembly moved along, and I have all the paper piecing finished.

I'd wanted to connect the outer corner parts to the central wedges and trim the last paper set, but I've got migraine coming on, so curved piecing and rotary cutter are not good ideas. 

It should all finish up over this next week, and then I can pull out my old Rabbit Hole BOM!

~*~*~

How are things on your end? Did you do any BOM work this week?

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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

TGIFF LinkUp - Finish Report - Daisies in the snow!!

Hello!  Welcome to this week's Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday hosting!

This is where you can link up your finishes that you're excited/relieved/proud about! Show us your finished quilt, or complicated quilt top, or even a full set of intricate blocks that took you forever to do!

We appreciate your including a link to this event in the post that you're sharing, and when you link up, don't forget to use the URL for your particular post page or image, not the general URL for your blog/album/IG account.  :)

**If you would like to host TGIFF at your blog, see this page for the sign-up link. (You do not need a thumbnail link-up subscription, as the blog managers can provide that for you.)


Binding was stitched yesterday for my second 2019 UFO finish: "Gems in the Daisies"

(I am linking up on Tish's UFO Busting post)

This is a fun 60x60 quilt top that I pieced in 2013, after buying all the fabrics to make the sample I'd seen in our Florida local quilt shop in 2010. I remember being enchanted by the jewel tones, that daisy print border, and the "gems" in the pineapple block piecing.

Wait! Are we really mid-spring?!

It wasn't on my Top 12 UFO list for this year, but it was the quilt that Uncle Don chose when I asked him to choose one of my tops that he'd like to have. I'm finding this to be a very effective motivator to finishing the 40-something quilt tops in my closet - just choose a relative/friend and ask them which one they would like!

Quilter's Dream 70/30 batting after one washing.

I tried out Quilter's Dream 70/30 batting for this one. Pros: full body for a thin batting, which shows the quilting a little better than a single layer of 80/20. Cons: less softness than 80/20 or cotton, doesn't crinkly quite as much if that's what you want, not as lofty as a single layer of wool, lots of poly content. It's not really 70/30. It's actually 60/40. So it was quite staticky in our dry climate, and this quilt will not breathe as well as cotton, wool, or even 80/20 quilts. I don't think I'll use it again in a functional quilt, but it would be great for a single-layer batting wall quilt or table topper.

I'm not sure why it was so difficult for me to choose a quilting scheme for this one, but I found something that played up the daisies theme and brought some good organic curviness into the very angular piecing. 

Rulers continue to become easier for me to handle. I was able to branch the curliques off the curved framing directly from the ruler mid-arc, so that I didnt' have to double-trace the main arc line to put in the curliques on a second pass. 

Some daisies in the yellow "gems", and some figure-8 fill work in the quilted arcs - first time I've been happy with it - 

And ribbon-candy stop-border work - 

Some metallic thread play in the blue and purple "gems", which sparkles *far* more in real life - 

A little bit of lacing arches at the printed "trim" in the borders- 

And some freehand e2e daisies along the flower border - 

I had some great purple batik in my stash to use for the border yesterday. Fortunately, it was all attached about 10 minutes before we lost power. I sure missed my Netflix movie session while stitching the back side down, but the storm raging around us provided a fair bit of distraction. Sometimes good, sometimes nervous-making (like when something big hit the roof, and when we heard a huge thud outside). White-out conditions made it hard to see much of anything past about 20 feet around the windows, and by 6pm, you couldn't see outside, anyway, because of the caking on the house:

So, wow!! Yeah!! Yesterday was a **day** here! I mean, can you believe all that snow we got in the photo op above?

We got more than snow. We got a full-on "snowicane." (Or, technically, Bomb Cyclone.) This passed right over us yesterday, with winds over 90mph. That snow was perfectly horizontal, and the drifts it created in our area are serious.

Having lived along the Florida coast for 20 years, I've been through 3 direct hurricane hits and 2 side-hits, so I knew a little of what to expect. It's not as super scary to hear the sounds the house makes when it happens during broad daylight instead of night time. But the cold temperature makes it more dangerous for the people who don't know to stay the heck in their houses. The power went out at brunch time, just as the heart of the storm hit, but I was completely amazed that they got it back on only 4 hours later. I was certain they wouldn't even start trying to fix it until the storm's backside would arrive, around 6-8pm. I'm sure all the people with electric-only heating in their homes were most appreciative! 

So many cars were stranded, that our region looks like a zombie movie set.

All the roads in the area were completely shut down, and we still can't get to Denver from here. I-25, 83, and 105 are all closed. Yesterday, a lot of people were stuck on the Interstate in cars with blown-out windows. 

None of our house's windows were broken, but we lost a beautiful double-trunk Ponderosa at the bottom of the property. This 4-5 story tree is down across the neighborhood road, and since it's only a tertiary road for the plows, county services won't start working on it for quite a while. At least the neighborhood has exit points from either direction.

This wind tracing image from yesterday is really cool. You can see why Interstates were completely shut down all across Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas. . . 

I kept thinking about the Children's Blizzard of 1888, when so many Plains school children died in the conditions. Thankfully, now we have much better weather forecasts and cell phones to call for help!

For most people, the work day was a total washout. For a quilter, it was a perfect storm day to snuggle under a quilt while stitching its binding.

~*~*~

But how about you? Have you finished a quilt, or quilt top, or complicated set of blocks recently? We'd love to see your accomplishment!  

Link up a post or IG photo below and look around a bit to help your fellow quilters celebrate a finished quilt or stage!  :)

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

BOMs Away - Dahlia Doings

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.)

Graduation being so near, I've been devoting all my attention to Heather's Dinner Plate Dahlia (this year's technique of the month from Judy Niemeyer). Just over 80 hours into this quilt, the top is at this point, stacked four deep:

(Wouldn't those saw-toothed spear petals make great cat eyes on some kind of stylized project?)

All the remaining paper piece components have 1/4 to 1/3 of their work finished. I run everything through factory style, doing all the prepwork possible until I run out of pins (starting with assembly seams, then moving into paper piecing sets), then sewing everything that was prepped, then pressing and cutting everything that was sewn, then doing as much prep work as I have pins for . . . in a never-ending cycle. I have enough pins for almost two hours of prepwork.

I'm getting a lot of binge-"watching" on Netflix in!!  Mostly, I just hear what's going on with a few peeks here and there when I trade out one pattern set of prepping for another.

This quilt has an interesting outward>>in construction approach. It's quite fun to work completely opposite from normal. 

I've finished several advanced paper-pieced quilt tops, so I wasn't expecting to learn something new with this one. I did though - a great technique for paper piecing curved seams that I'm sure I wouldn't have figured out on my own. So that's a bonus.  :)  

This point of the work brings me a little bit past my March OMG mark, but I'm crossing my fingers that I may just get the entire top together by month's end. That will depend on when the two customer quilts come in that Dolly is trying to finish quickly. Until then, all BOM time will be devoted to this project, so hopefully you won't get sick to death of it!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

BOMs Away - Heather's Graduation Dahlia (and March OMG)

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.)

So, there I was, completely absorbed with the concept of a mega-UFO year and happy to work on finishing long-term projects without feeling I needed to jump into new distractions. . . 

When I sat staring at Heather's graduation quilt from undergrad and realized her med school graduation is THIS MAY. Oh, boy! This was something that needed a master quilt, and I wanted it to be in her school colors like her previous graduation quilts.

And then I saw the latest Judy Niemeyer Technique-of-the-Month quilt in the perfect colorway:

The Judy Niemeyer "Dinner Plate Dahlia" - 2019 Technique of the Month

So, the last week of February was spent acquiring the pattern and fabrics, washing, ironing, and organizing all those paper units and cutting the templates and pattern pieces out for books 2-4 (book 1 is the overall guide/instructions). Hours and hours and hours of time already in this project.

Accordingly, my March OMG is to get the cutting finished for the last two books, get all the units paperpieced for books 2 and 3, and do as much of the quilt assembly as possible to that point.

I did get a good start during my BOM time this weekend:

~*~*~

How are things on your end? Did you do any BOM work this week?

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.

Inlinkz Link Party