BOMs Away - Birthdays and Lights and Mysteries!

Welcome to the Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays! 

We'd love to see the BOM you're working on lately. 

This week's link-up is at the bottom of the post.

Hey! I hope you're enjoying your holiday time. I actually touched my quilting "stuff" today for the first time since the 23rd. Not for super long, but I did get some things done. 

I did not work on my 4th-Sunday BOM, Wind in the Whiskers, because that requires a big fabric pull-out for several hours, and the table I do that at was needed for this today:

Birthday fun! I had a blast indulging Kyle's Pokemon penchant with a fabulous Pikachu cake made by one of my Taekwondo friends. 

So my normal BOM got ditched for birthday fun.

But I did manage to put together this week's Clue 5 work for the Bonnie Hunter Grand Illusion Mystery. I even did 1/3 of the work for last week's Clue 4, and paired up all those pink and blue HSTs with the yellow squares. 

(Linking this up at Bonnie's Mystery Monday Link-up)

By the way - Paul at the "Outnumbered Quilter" blog is putting together a really cool interactive map for Bonnie showing where people are working on the mystery. Looks like this so far. It's zoomable just like Mapquest stuff - very fun.

 If you're working on this mystery, you should add a tack in your city! You can include your name or go anonymous. Either way, just put your city/state(province), not your personal address. Here's the link for that and you click on the "Additions" tab in the upper left area to add a tack: 

"Locations of Quilters Doing GIMQ"

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And that work is all I did for the day, because then we went on a little road trip for some family time doing this:

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How are things at your place? Have you snuck in some sanity time to put a block together, or maybe start assembling a BOM top that you've worked on all year? Or perhaps it's just too crazy a time to do sewing and you're enjoying the holiday and your family?  :D

Christmas Family Fun

We've been enjoying some serious down time with each other for our Christmas holiday. No quilting work has happened at all since the 23rd. Most everybody went to the Christmas Eve candlelight service at the Air Force Academy chapel (Heather had to work, and I was too head-cold sick to go).

That night I set my alarm for 2:30, but when I came downstairs, I found that Devon and Kyle had beat us to the Santa Clausing!  

They had draped several of our Christmas blankets and quilts on the sofas with snowball garlands, and even on the coffee table. . . 

And the onsies hung all around the room!! lol!! I don't know where they found onesies with feet that were tall enough for this family!

The stockings were already too stuffed to fit in the bits we'd picked up to add in! (Those two were having such fun planning their Christmas spending that I let them take the cash I would have used so they could also do the shopping for stocking goodies.)

I actually chuckled at the Kleenex left out for Second-Santa.

They had even cleaned the kitchen all up!

Scott and I added the last bits to the pile, and Navarre couldn't figure out if he thought it was the coolest thing ever to have a mini mountain in front of his tree, or if it ticked him off to have the front dive-in entrance blocked by it.  lol!!

Those onesies were a blast on Christmas morning, and each of the stockings had a furry snowball for a family snowball fight thus attired! This is the funnest bunch of "kids".  :D

Mr. Bear Cheeks - 

Navarre managed to last through the entire unwrapping event, albeit with a mighty glazed look on his face by the end of it - he gets overloaded with input sometimes when things are running out of the ordinary.  

But Isabeau preferred staying up above all the chaos to enjoy the scene.

These are some of my favorite images from the day:

Heather vamping that onesie up:

Kyle watching Pokemon while working on a tiny sculpture - 

Devon has always been my all-or-nothing baby - 

And it's fun to watch the two of them having fun together -

Marissa was adorable diving into her speakers jackpot

And those GINORMOUS Peppermint Patties -

How sweet can you get?

My Quilt Parlor was once again transformed into an actual dining room.

Gotta love Pinterest finds!

And I definitely LOVE my family. What a treat to have everybody living here right now!

I hope you're all having a great holiday time, whether it's quiet and relaxing, full of family fun, or bringing you travel adventures~!  I am back to more game-playing - that table hasn't been put back up on its risers just yet.  ;D

Christmas Snow :D

Thank you, Colorado - 

Christmas Snow our first year here.  :D

Our first icicles

back yard's a bit chilly for a Christmas picnic!

The birds love living under this tree

  

Snow Concert!

Whoa!  That's one morning's traffic at the basement patio feeder!
squirrels, birds, bunnies

Bun-Bun!

Sledding on our back hill! Best use of moving boxes ever.  :D

o/' Surfaris: Wipeout!

And, of course, the periodic chore work that comes with
the fun, gorgeous white stuff.

2012 Christmas Quilt Show - Scoot, Santa!

I love these virtual quilt shows! Thank you to Michele at Quilting Tutorials for hosting the 2012 Christmas Quilt Show.

The link-up is open until Nov. 30, so if you have a Christmas or Winter quilt to share, why not join in?  :D



 I'm super excited that I finished "Scoot, Santa!" in time to share it.

Making this quilt was a special treat from pre-conception to finish. It was a naughty thing to do, because I'm supposed to be strictly working on UFOs. But I was shopping on Etsy one day for a sweater for our Siamese and when I saw the Santa on scooter fabric, I just about died. You see, everything "scooter" makes me think of my aunt with a big smile. So there was no way I could pass up that yard of fabric, and this became my November NewFO.

So, I gave myself hard-fast rules:  1. It *had* to be sewn into a quilt in time for this year's Christmas; 2. I had to use *only* other fabrics from my stash; 3. I must break a quilting rule - if I was going to be naughty, I needed to get my "rebel" on in full!

Two weeks ago I came up with a concept, and had a most successful dig through the stash.  The execution went off without much of a hitch - I just had a momentary pause when I saw my original road strips laid out and hated how overpowering they were. After sleeping on it, I realized I just needed to trim back the yellow. I couldn't bear to let go of the roads - Santa needed them. Plus, the shape was reminiscent of Santa's buckle.

The broken rule? You see how I put the background greens on the diagonal? Well, I didn't feel like piecing strips to make them long enough, and I sure didn't feel like cutting wide strips on the bias, so I cut them long-wise on grain and sewed them so that the edges of the quilt were all bias. This would really upset some of my older-generation quilt mentors, as it poses several potential problems - stretching as the quilt is pulled on, warping as you're working on it. . .  But I figured it was a smaller lap quilt, so I'd give it a whirl. This is only 48" x 54".

Because of all that bias, I used a ton of pins to baste it - spacing within 3 inches.

For the most part, I did horizontal lines about an inch apart, using my walking foot. Between all those pins, the good amount of quilting, and a heavier-than-usual backing of fine-wale corduroy, I had no problems at all with rippling, and it is very sturdy! 3 strands of gray floss worked perfectly for the hand-quilted  lane lines.

*Love* that backing. It's a gorgeous claret red. Nice and heavy/comfy for a New England or Colorado-mountain home.

The Santas were placed so that their scooters were on the level of the roads, and I did a simple free-motion meander with loops and snowflakes (yes, it was a tad challenging with that corduroy).

And I even had the perfect gold-on-black fabric for the binding~!  I succeeded in all three rules - everything I needed for this project came from stash - all support fabrics, the backing, the batting, and even all the threads.

The best part of all: There was enough of everything to make a twin so we can keep one here in Colorado~! I only needed to splice some batting together.  :D

So now that you've let me share my "Scoot, Santa" before it flies away to its new home, why not go on over to the Christmas Quilt Show and take a look at the many other wonderful projects people are sharing?  :D

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I'm also linking this up as my finish report for this week's Friday and this month's NewFO:

Thanks to these great hosts for superb inspirational link-ups! You should check these places out for more cool projects folks have finished. :D

* Link A Finish Friday at Richard's *