18 in 2018 September Work Link-Up

For those who are using this challenge to work up 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your August and September accomplishments.

I apologize profusely for failing to post a link in August and being late with this one!

18 in 2018 July Work Link-UP

For those who are using this challenge to work up 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your June accomplishments.

We're now on the downhill side of the year! I better get cracking!

18 in 2018 June work Link-Up

For those who are using this challenge to work up 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your June accomplishments.

18 in 2018 May work Link-up

You guys!  I am so sorry that this month's link-up is so late!!

For those who are using this challenge to finish 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your May accomplishments.

18 in 2018 - April Link-Ups

Happy April, Spring, and Easter!

For those who are using this challenge to finish 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your April accomplishments.

WOW!  We had a great month last time! 

I mean, look at all this work we achieved!  ~~>

I know it's helping me to have these open-ended link-ups where we can post an accomplishment when we did it instead of waiting for a particular link day.



Let's do it again and get a few more things checked off this month!

This link will stay open all month so that you can link a post at any time reporting a finished item from your list. 

For details on this challenge and the place to link-up a planning list of your own,

go to: 18 in 2018.

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.

~*~*~

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

18 in 2018 - March Link-Ups

For those who are using the challenge to finish 18 steps on WIPs and UFOs this year, this is the link-up place for your March accomplishments.

You folks are really jammin! Lots of good link-ups last month despite it being a slow one for me. The UFO I've been focused on keeps going and going and going. . .   Almost there, though! I hope to have 2, if not 3 link-ups this month.

What can we get done this month?

This link will stay open all month so that you can link a post at any time reporting a finished item from your list. 

For details on this challenge and the place to link-up a planning list of your own,

go to: 18 in 2018.

Finish Report! :) "Bohemia" is off my 18 in 2018 List

I do really love this folksy quilt, which was also on my Q1 list!  [Post two of two finishes to share today!]
   

It is made from the "Bohemia" collection of fabric by Julie Paschkis. I got the kit and whipped up the top in January 2014. Then it waited patiently-patiently in my Flimsy Closet while I finished saving up for the longarm. Other flimsies meant as special gifts and commissions monopolized my quilting time at the domestic during these years.

I had intended to hang this on the shorter rod in the family room, but the colors are just so gorgeous by the piano. And the camera has an incredibly difficult time showing these fabrics properly.

This quilt was done with a single layer of Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 cotton/poly, and I challenged myself to work in free-hand organic motifs with minimal SID on this quilt, to go with the whole feel of the fabric. It finished up at 48.75 x 68.75 inches after binding.

First I did the tiny bit of SID around the stop border, the panel edges, and the biggest triangular shapes (not the individual triangles). Then I put in the fill work for the four corner pieces (a simple flowery meander) and the smaller black-print triangles of the main peaks (even simpler loops). With that same black SoFine thread and SuperBob bobbins, I put in long leafy fingers in the black portions of the pinwheel blocks.

This was a perfect quilt to practice free-hand work on. As you can see, the prints hide most of the work, so it seriously doesn't matter how uneven your loops get or if you have wobbles in your echoing!

Next I changed over to black Glide thread with a MagnaGlide bobin and did the borders. I just followed around the elements in pretty open detailing, throwing in some leaves and curls in the upper open area.

The animal mini panels were super fun. I just outlined the elements and did some of the details in larger animals with that same thread.

Next I used a gold and a green Glide to put in poppies on the small colored triangles and some sculpting in the gold portions of the pinwheels. Other than the edge of the stop border and the big triangle peaks, those pinwheel teal-to-gold edges have the only straight lines on this quilt, followed by what I called wind-stream echoing. They were essential in defining the pinwheels - those blocks really melted into themselves before quilting and didn't look much like pinwheels. 

Didn't have a teal Glide, so I pulled out an Aurifil 50wt spool for those poppies and the remaining pinwheel sections (which got elongated flower petals).

Last of all, I put in some cream Glide with a cream MagnaGlide bobbin to draw folksy flowers-and-leaves in the cream borders around the animal panels.

The back is a green fabric from the collection, but I'd originally purchased enough for a domestic-quilting back, not for a longarm frame. So I augmented it with the black print from the collection that I'd also bought in a good bit of yardage. Two of my daughters love that print, so I'll be dividing the rest and sewing it to some cool minky backings (no batting) for them to have throws made from it.

Add a hanging sleeve. . .

. . .and lay it out to finish block-drying, and soon it's good to go for display. My family loves it as much as I do.

"Bohemia" is on my Q1 Finish-Along list, and is the first full finish pulled off my 18 in 2018 list.

~*~*~ Linking up at

UFO Busting Linkup at Tish's 18 in 2018 February Progress link at Lynette's 
TGIFF   Thank Goodness It's Finished Fridays is at Kate's this week
Whoop! Whoop! at Sarah's 
2018 Finish-A-Long Q1 Reports at Sandra's