BOMs Away - Sage & Sea Glass, a handful of Dots

 

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)

Wow! Yesterday I shared the finish of a BOM that was started back in fall 2014. What a huge lifting off my shoulders, but it's always been a favorite.

Just had to peek at Sew Spooky one more time

And since I finished the piecing work for two active BOMs recently, today I pulled out a new one:

Meet Sage & Sea Glass - or, what she'll look like when she grows up. This is a Kim Diehl pattern and fabric set.

After I purchased it in September, I washed all the fabrics and cut and kitted it to use as a BOM - Bag of the Month in this case, versus Block of the Month.

Today I did the Bag 1 sewing:

Above the funky bird, those are 100 little 1 x 2 inch flying geese that are now preening their feathers on my BOM board, waiting for more friends from their project to play with them.

Oh!  and I prepped the next set of Temperature Dots. I decided I'll stitch them up only every 3 or 4 weeks, when I have more per thread color at a time.

 ~*~*~*~

Now it's your turn to share any BOM type work you've done lately. 

:)

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

Finish Report! ~ Sew Spooky

Woohoo!!!  You guys!  My "Sew Spooky" is FINALLY a finished quilt hanging on the wall!  It was my February OMG, and is my first full finish of the year, my first UFO completely shot down.  (Flimsy finishes are like "sightings" in my mind, and I've had a great run of 4 or 5 so far this year, but full finishes are the best score, of course!)

This is 55.5 x 66.5 inches after quilting and a wash. It was a 58 x 70 inch flimsy, and has dense quilting throughout. I always prewash fabrics and presoak batting, so if you don't do that, expect a lot more shrinkage. Batting is a single layer of Hobbs 80/20 Heirloom. It is soooo soft after the washing, yet the quilting still has nice dimension and looks great hanging. Dozens of threads were used on this, including several colors each of Microquilter, SoFine, Glide 40 and 60 weights, Aurifil 50 weight, Bottom Line, and Sulky Holoshimmer. I used pre-wound SuperBobs in silver, black, and orange, whichever was closest to the color being done on top. Designed by Arlene Stamper and Melissa Harris.

Started as a BOM in October 2014, and sewn up relatively quickly, this was partially quilted on my domestic in 2016, but then set aside when I decided to get a longarm. I wanted to do a lot of fancy quilting on it, so it was shelved to await a time when I felt comfortable with the new set-up. And then it waited and waited.

In 2019 I squared up the backing's overflows and started working it on the longarm. I'm not sure why it got pulled off after only doing the top bat blocks. I do remember that I wasn't particularly happy with how my quilting design was turning out, and it was a time-consuming process that I was not about to pick out. It was something to do with wishing I'd used a slightly larger scale with the "wallpapering."

It got re-loaded in early September, but family deaths followed by getting a bad Covid case derailed all my quilting until mid-January. I did not have the heart to pull this off the frame yet again, so I called it my Pre#7 in terms of the APQ UFO Challenge that I settled into for 2021.

When I started back at my longarm on Jan 11, I could only do 15 minutes per day. This week I have been able to do three 90 minute sessions per day! So I'm slowly rebuilding stamina.

The first thing I tackled on this quilt was finishing up those bats. That took F O R E V E R, given my capabilities at the time. And once I finished, I was magically much, MUCH happier with the effect of the scale. I actually love them now!

Not knowing how-the-heck to quilt anything else, I had to jump mental hurdles for every element as I moved along. The candy corns were simple, as I wanted them to have good dimension, so they just kept the ditchwork and single line across the middle of the sections. For their background, I went with a curly-cue feather approach that was inspired by the print on their background fabric.

Next I tackled that bright orange sashing. I thought with the candy corn being a thing, this provided a good place for me to practice ribbon candy, which I'd never done before. I wanted to learn the double style, and my conclusion was that single-style is far more pretty in a 1-inch sashing. The double is pretty in wider sashing. In the end, though, the flatness of the double on this scale works better for this densely quilted quilt than the single would have.

See how the single style leaves more dimension play, and is cleaner and prettier in the small space? -

After the sashing, I turned to the blocks and did the work on the buildings. The witch house in the center was the most fun, as it kinda has a witch's dress feel to it. So I accented the buckle idea on the upper floor and gave the main floors a Bo-Peep style skirt ruffles effect.

I always kept in mind that I wanted my buildings to have more dimension than the background quilting, so everything was quilted more open on them. When I hit the background quilting, I used McTavishing as my main fill, but incorporated feathers, flowers, tree leaves, lamp glowings, and "magic spinners" here and there in the blocks.

Paths got dimensional lines, but the grass eluded me forever about how to handle. I finally tried out a half-inch on-point grid for CC's, and those worked out perfectly for lawn areas.

The black web border had been done on my domestic years ago, with a simple webbing-style FMQ pattern.

Which left only those star corners. Some ditch work around the circles and stars, outline the owls, and then I tried out that Sulky Holoshimmer thread on my longarm for some shooting star lines and "magic" squiggles. Wasn't sure how that was going to behave!

After a few minutes of fiddling with tension, though, it worked just fine. I used the lateral spool feeder on top of my machine, skipping the entire back half of the tensioning path and lowering the number of threading hole in the front half's bars. I did use a slick Glide bobbin with it instead of the matte SuperBobs. I only had like 1 break in the thread, so I was happy. I even went back and put silver highlighting on the belt of the central block, the cloud outlines on the witch block, and the detailing on the Ghoul School's doors, and then pulled out some glittery variegated thread to try for some more "magic" swirls in the Jack-O'-Lantern house's doorway and a window. Worked great. I'll be playing more with those specialty threads in future!

None of the metallics show up at all in the photos. In real life they glisten so prettily. Gold around the ghosts to help their glittery white fabric stand out a little more from the background fabric, as well as around the little moon and witch's broom straw, and the star on the crow's pumpkin. Silver holoshimmer thread and glittery variegated was used as described above in the quilting.

This quilt has fun embellishments here and there - novelty buttons mainly, with some embroidered eyes for crows, spiders, and cat.

It even has its own free-floating mini quilt that's hand quilted! With a "friend" underneath!

And even though I knew from the beginning this would primarily be a wall quilt, I gave it a fun Halloween print for its backing.

. . . Along with an appliqued bat for its label.  :)

For a quilt that used up so much mental energy to figure out how to approach it for the quilting, it sure did turn out magnificently.

Linking up with:

February OMG finish party

Tish's UFO Busting party

BOMs Away - dots and binding

 

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)

Not much BOM happened here this weekend. I spent most of my time up on the high ladder, cleaning all our upper windows and the entry chandelier. They were so grimy! Nice and sparkly now, though. 

I made my 8 temperature dots, but didn't stitch them down yet.

(I'm using the 2" Perfect Circles templates for these, and setting them onto a 3" finished-size block.)

And I got most of the binding stitched down for my Sew Spooky, so there's that for BOM work, as this was originally from this category of work. One more TV session will do it.

It will need to be cleaned and blocked, and then still gets embellishments and a label and hanging sleeve, but I'm hoping to have it fully finished by next week's post!

 ~*~*~*~

Now it's your turn to share any BOM type work you've done lately. 

:)

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 - and ~ Flimsy Alert!~ Forever My Valentine on a cold, coooold day!

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)

Happy Valentine's Day.  :)

This turned out to be the absolutely most-perfect day to put this flimsy together - both for theme and for weather! 

The flannel fabrics helped warm my finger and legs while it was all of TEN DEGREES BELOW ZERO while I was working. In-house is a cool 63 degrees despite both fires going. I suppose I could have cranked the register up to 95, but we decided not to. Sweaters, socks, and quilts, Baby!

That super-freeze I was "complaining" about missing out on last week? It's here now!

This was a kitted Block-of-the-Month, designed and sold by Shabby Fabrics. I started it in February 2018. It's 59-1/2 inches square.

Our high today was all of -1 Fahrenheit while I was stitching up the next eight temperature dots. 

And partly because now I had enough dots for it, I'd finished stitching the "year block" during TV yesterday, and because now my BOM board looks So. Very. Bare. with the Valentine blocks gone, I put together the first two rows of my 2021 Temperature Quilt:

(It's still super bare on the whole right portion!)

During lunch, when I looked out at the bird feeder zone, I couldn't figure out what kind of drab-looking robin type bird was nesting in the snow underneath and occasionally drumming up seed from the ground. . .  

(An uncredited photo from Audubon.) I was seeing this big puffball from the top as it was nestled in a hole in the 4-5" of snow that it had carved out.

But it turned out to be one of our adorable little juncos all super-puffed for the polar cold! Good thing they're winter-lovers to start with.

Normally they're petite little things, much smaller than the robin, and you would never mistake them for each other.  I put the photo of the robin above the junco, with them sized to show you the approximate difference in the bird sizes.

Yesterday we had several groups of deer, and one lone buck, come through to suck at the bird feeders - I'm sure they sensed bad weather and wanted to stock up. We haven't seen any of them today. They undoubtedly stayed hunkered down together to keep warm!

So, anyway! I hope you are warm, wherever you are!

 ~*~*~*~

Now it's your turn to share any BOM type work you've done lately. 

:)

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 - Harmony

 

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)

Hello there! Have you given your BOM-type project(s) attention lately?

This weekend I worked on my "Harmony" BOM -

Month 2's Melody blocks:

Month 3's Rhythm blocks:

and another smattering of leader-ender duples for the checkerboard border later on:

I also put together the next 8 temperature dots:

So much for our super-freeze this week. . . no purples here! In fact, a lot of warm greens! 

I put the fire on tonight purely for this photo.  :D

~*~*~*~

Now it's your turn to share any BOM type work you've done lately. 

:)

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

~ Flimsy Alert ~ "Kashmir"

Hmmm... Rummaging around in the background areas of Blogger to find spam comments to delete en masse, I found this post that was started on Dec 19 and not actually finished!

I finished my Kashmir quilt top that day:

"Kashmir," a Jinny Beyer design - 82 x 82 inches

It was a Jinny Beyer kit that I cut out and kitted up in mid-August 2012. Poor thing sat in my UFO storage room all this time, and look how gorgeous it is!

I hope to be able to slip it into the already-scheduled quilting line-up later this year. Just in case, I'm going to prep the backing and binding this week. 

The nice thing about all the fussy cutting involved with this pattern is that I have enough good bits left over to do more fussy cutting for smaller blocks for another project. I can even get enough border for a wall quilt together. I'm really digging the idea of these combined with pretty greens for a Christmas hanging. I'm looking forward to pulling the box back out on December 1st later this year to do some free-play with it all.  :)

February~!

My One Monthly Goal is to finish all the quilting on my Sew Spooky. 

It was loaded onto my frame in late September, but didn't get touched while we visited Scott's mom, and then attended her funeral. Which we got Covid from.  :( 

Since I hadn't stepped foot in my longarm room from before we were exposed (which remains closed to keep kitties out), I left it shut up to keep it virus free in there. It took many weeks for me to have enough energy to even attempt to work at the longarm, so that door stayed "sealed" until January 4th. 

Since then, I've managed to push my physical capability from 30 minutes in a day to two 40 minute sessions in a day. I hope to get up to 1 hour in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon by the end of this week. 

Being a quilt that I wanted to practice a lot of tiny fill work on, its time on the frame has really S T R E T C H E D out over the weeks!

This is the month, though! This baby's going to get finished finally.  

And because that's only a fraction of the time I have available, here is "The Rest of the Story" for February --

Mon-Fri Priority Time: 

Longarm: Sew Spooky > when that finishes, load up UFOq #2 King Size Dahlia

Domestic: FMQ on Moose Lake for Scott > then move to UFOp #2 Down the Rabbit Hole, which needs the rest of the applique on the rabbit borders and the outer diamond piecework border.  [Plus slip in 10 min per day on the secret birds.] [Leader-Ender = Feathered Goose units 4]

Evening hand stitching: 

Finish the first bathroom curtain, and how far will I get on And to All a Good Night? It's possible that might be finished this month; if so, pull out the next Affairs of the Heart block.

Saturday Free-Play: 

Whatever UFO catches my eye (usually ends up being that weekend's BOM)

Weekend BOM times: 

[Temperature dots] and rotate Harmony, Forever My Valentine, and Surfer's Point

That is not as much tasking as it looks to be. With an empty nest house, I have several hours every day that I can devote to quilting things. I spend more time at my domestic machine these days since I have limited physical capability at the longarm. I do completely different work on the weekends from what I do Mon-Fri. I am *not* one of those people who can work on only one project all the time every day for weeks on end until it is finished. That is the fastest way to kill my mojo altogether, and then nothing happens.

Also note that other than my OMG, my list acts not as a whipping post demanding multiple finishes, but more like a bowling lane's bumper rails that keep me focused while I work along. I'm happy with whatever point each of those projects gets to by month's end. This part of my planning is about the journey, not the finishes (although the finishes crop up regularly). 

*If you were looking for the BOMs Away link-up, it is on the last post: BOMs Away Monday 

Linking this post up to OMG February