~ Flimsy Alert! ~ Chubby Chicks - July OMG

 Here is my July OMG, all finished up.  :) 

"Chubby Chicks" is 60 x 60 inches, and is a Black Mountain Needleworks pattern. This is blanket-stitched fused applique.

This was a kit that I bought who-knows-when - it was in my conglomeration of NETYs (Not Even Touched Yet) that I organized after we moved here summer of 2012. In June 2013, I pulled it out to prewash its fabrics, and our oldest daughter and I got the chick bodies fused down. 

In May this year, EIGHT YEARS LATER, I stitched the bodies, added and stitched the beaks, and stitched in the feet. Now it is a super cute flimsy, hanging in my longarm closet. 

Not sure when its turn will come up, but the binding is made and tidily tucked into my drawer for those. 

I really love having bindings ready to go when I've quilted a top up! Plus, it's nice to release any leftovers "into the wild" of my stash, instead of needing to store them separately somewhere. Maybe 1 in 9 or 10 quilt tops don't have the binding in here - either I didn't already have fabric for that, or I won't know what kind of binding I'll want to do until it's quilted. In 5 years of doing this, there's only been 1 binding I changed my mind about, and that has already been repurposed onto another quilt, so it's all great!

I'll be linking this to the July reporting party at the end of the month:

One Monthly Goal: July

July! ~

Let's see if I can remember the second half of this month's OMG tasking - to actually post and link my accomplishment.  ;D

First, the first step: Proclaiming my July project.

My One Monthly Goal for July is to get my Chubby Chicks UFO to finished flimsy status. 

I want its orange shoebox out of my storage, its binding made and filed in my bindings drawer, and the quilt top hanging in my longarm closet before this month is out. 

Right now, that UFO looks like this:

This was a kit that I bought who-knows-when - it was in my conglomeration of NETYs (Not Even Touched Yet) that I organized after we moved here summer of 2012. In June 2013, I pulled it out to prewash its fabrics, and our oldest daughter and I got the chick bodies fused down. 

In May this year, EIGHT YEARS LATER, I stitched the bodies, added and stitched the beaks, and stitched in the feet. That was my APQ challenge work. June brought a different focus for that program, and July yet another, so it's tempting to set Chubby Chicks aside again to clear its box off my work station.

I don't want that box sitting on my shelves for another eight years. It's not a priority quilt, so I won't give it any attention without putting it on OMG status. Let's get this baby all sewn up!

Linking this post up to OMG July

NewFO Report for June - Whoooo's Your Mama, Chubby Chicks, Tuscany Terrace

Let me see if I can get back in the groove with my blog - still dealing with lingering Lupus flare issues after the fire stress, but I've almost got my days back to normal operating mode.  :)


Love Barbara's NewFO parties each month, and they're really helping me get these kits pulled out of stone-cold status and on their way to becoming quilts before my youngest is out of high school.  ;D  Lots of other fun projects emerging, so take a fun breakfast stroll through the other links.

My planned NewFO for June was to do something with one of the fabrics my daughter gave me for Mother's Day. I developed this design on my EQ6, and have made decent progress on it.

The center is finished. Everything other than the fun Owls Devon gave me comes out of stash for this project. It's fun to meet the challenge this year of only working with what I already have. 

And I have the plumes appliqued on one border strip. I just hate this method - ha!! I wanted turned-under edges, but have too much hand-stitching lined up right now, so I wanted to run these through the machine. So I'm doing the freezer-paper thing where you starch and iron under the seam allowance. Gahhhh!!!!   It's so slow and cumbersome. I know many folks love this method, and that's super cool - I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool true-blue back-baster, and all this fussy prep drives me nuts.  ;D  I like the end result, though, so I'll push through the muck until I have this finished to flimsy stage.

Heather and I had - what - - 5 days of sitting at Flee Status, anticipating evacuation orders and holding our breath while we watched the daily winds blow at us from the fire. That was far too stressful a time to do any of the intense FMQ work that was my priority job for the month, and my hands were way too micro-jittery to hand stitch. So I pulled two more NewFO's out of deep storage, washed and dried their fabrics, and once we were out of real danger but still too stressed to do close work, I cut them all out and kitted them up for later attention. 

Chubby Chicks wasn't blue (sick of working with it so much lately), wasn't hard to do, and Heather and I fused the bodies to the blocks. This is as far as it went, and it'll be many months, I'm sure, before I pull this back out. 

Another one intended to long-term marinate: Tuscany Terrace, so we'll have a second quilt large enough for our bed. Whenever I get to it for actual sewing, it'll feel like it's flying through the piecing - despite being king size - since it's already all cut out.  :)