~ Flimsy Alert!! ~ Let's Build a Snowman!

 Woohoo!!

Yesterday I finished my January #7-piecing UFO, which has been boxed and stuffed at the back of the shelves since Dec 31, 2013.

49" x 59" - pattern by Possibilities.

(These super fun snowmen will get their eyes and mouths after the quilting is finished, with hotfix "coal" rhinestones.)

I purchased this kit some time before we moved across country mid-2012. I pulled it out of storage in Dec 2013, and was enormously disappointed.

Unlike all the other times I had bought kits from small shops online, this one was not a good situation. The fabrics were not at all those shown in the kit photograph, and they didn't go well together in the least. Some were completely missing. Others had nowhere near enough.

(Let me re-iterate that I have purchased - and still do so - many kits from small shops online, and the vast majority are absolutely fine. The few problems that have popped up are quickly fixed if you communicate with them - assuming you haven't left it in storage so long that they no longer have the kit's materials.)

My finished top is very like the kit photo. I ended up using only one of the panel backgrounds the shop sent in the kit, and perhaps 1/4 of the applique fabrics. The rest came from my stash and scrap bins. I managed to fuse all the rows by month's end, and then put it all in a box in disgust at the experience.

So it went into back-shelf storage that looks something like this, only with closed boxes. It even fell back behind, and it took me 3 hours to find it when I purposefully went looking for it on January 1st.  haha!

I didn't touch it until now. Since January 1, this has been my priority project several hours a day Monday - Friday.

All that blanket stitching took FOREVER, but turned out really nice. I joined the rows, went to the shop in the city to replace the terrible border fabrics they'd put in the kit, and got the narrow borders put on so that I could finish the blanket stitching of the parts that overlap the borders. We didn't see Bernie when we were at the shop. ;D

Aren't the memes flying around so hilarious?!

Yesterday I attached the final border and prepped the binding. LOVE IT!! now it all goes into my longarming closet, and may or may not make it onto the frame before next January.

I'm picking up another long-term UFO for attention at my domestic machine during the work-week, and continue to build the amount of time that I can work at my longarm each day. I'm up to 1:10 before my body is too fatigued. I continue to be amazed at how long Covid can substantially affect you. It's been 3 months and two weeks.

So, while I'm not sure I'll finish my pre-#7-quilting UFO before month's end, I continue to chip away at it each day after lunch. One bit at a time, I'll get to where I can pull Sew Spooky off and give it some binding. I had loaded it up the day before we went to Scott's mom's funeral (and got Covid), and I just couldn't bear to take it off once again. It's had so many false starts at getting its quilting done up.