BOMs Away - A side trip into the jungle for a ~ FINISH ~ report!

         

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 didn't do any BOM work this week. (again)   I wanted to finish up the baby photo op quilt that Devon asked me to make. 

She wanted a jungle theme to match her nursery, and green instead of white background. It so happened that I had the perfect fabric in my stash for that.  

It was super gratifying to find every single thing I needed for this in my stash and "scrap" bins. I even pulled those balloon colors from my Temperature Quilt stack!

Since this is not a quilt for normal kiddo use, I took the opportunity to use the bit of high-puff poly batting that has been lurking forever in my batting cupboard. I hate poly in quilts - it makes me sweat like crazy, even when it's thin and the temperature's very cold. Plus, it's not good to use it in baby/children's quilts, as it melts onto their skin in fire situations (and Dad is a firefighter!).  But this quilt is only going to be laid on once a month for a photo op.

I did use pin-basting quite a lot to control that high puff!

I was quite amazed that I didn't have a (big enough) green on hand that I liked for the backing. I mean, I have a huge bin of green yardage in my stash! The only one that was the right shade was strongly Christmas, so that was a no-go. I do have four large bins of fabric given to me last month by a person who knew she would not be quilting anymore. It includes five pieces of cotton chenille fabrics, and one of those was a pine green that played superbly with this. So I thought, what the heck? Let's see what happens if we use this.

It quilted just fine. I wondered if it would give me tensioning fits, but it didn't! I was able to whip along at my regular "scribble" speed to put all that leafy/curls fill. 

The chenille did make the machine's high-speed operation sound subtlely different - more thrumming-ish. Surprisingly, my husband even noticed that when he passed my workroom one time! 

It also makes the finished quilt, with that medium-dense fill and poly batting, feel like a bath mat! So I wouldn't use something like this on a quilt meant for bed use or snuggling. Although. . . it's nice and heavy feeling, and would work very nicely as a weighted quilt for a sensory person who likes those! (I would use cotton batting, though, so it flows better.)

I just cut single-fold binding strips from the backing overage, same as I would with minky on the binding. Cutting it 1-3/8 inch wide worked perfectly, and it wasn't hard to stitch the back side down. 

I made the changeable numbers by fusing black fabric onto black 80/20 batting. 

I printed out a font I liked in the size I wanted, glue-sticked the numbers onto the top of the fabric, and cut out around them (then popped off the paper). Worked like a charm. The intention is that the batting will grip the fabric in the sign so the numbers don't shift around for the photo, like a felt board. Of course, when Baby's moving around a lot later on, that could be tricky to capture. heh!  

Now we just need a baby! Any day now - perhaps even any hour!!!

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Have you worked on any BOM type projects recently? We'd love to see your progress!

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 

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