WIP'n along and Whoop'n it up

Woohoo!!!   This is #16 on my 17 in 2017 list, so I know now that I can check them all off by year's end.

Devon's quilt has quite a bit of quilting that was done on the domestic. There is a lot left, though, and much had to be done to prep it for the longarm. 

Something like 250 pins have been taken out of the blue area, all the hundreds of tails are tied and tucked, backing is squared, and spacers are sewn onto the three narrow sides (I anticipate wanting to turn this quilt for easier border work.) This is a large queen quilt.

I did all the marking yesterday on the Sapphire Stars Mystery quilt that I'm finishing as a special QOV for my father-in-law. I made the USAF stencil the old-school way by printing the right size onto cardstock and wielding an X-acto knife. Also cut the border elements out of a cereal box (some day I'll have star rulers for longarms, but for now it's old-school).  I got about 1/2 of the stabilizing done on the longarm before night's call. Hopefully this afternoon I can finish that up and start on some of the fun work.

And my early-morning attention is currently on puffins and penguins - they're maybe halfway finished getting their trapunto work.  :)   This FMQ work still happens at my domestic machine for two reasons: 1) I don't have nearly enough fine control yet with my longarm to do close-edge applique quilting with so many tiny details; 2) Quilting through multiple layers of fusible can be really tricky even without fine-control issues. I'll be waiting until I have a lot more experience with my longarm and its reaction to various threads, fabrics, and pop-up issues before putting any fusibles on it.

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Linking to:

Lorna's Let's Bee Social, 

Sarah's Whoop, Whoop!

Meridithe's 17 in 2017

BOMs Away - "Miss You! Love, Mom" February

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.

Alright!!  How 'bout that Super Bowl game? Huge Bronco following in our area, of course, so that was fun.

Today I got back on track for my normal BOM line-up each week. I got both of my Devon & Kyle minis fused up just as the first quarter was really getting going.

I drew an extension of Cynthia Staub's pattern, "Garden Visitor," which I had purchased from her Craftsy shop - Quilt Doodle Designs. (Her original design is the girl fox with her flowers. I added the boy fox and the bleeding hearts stem.)  It came out so cute, even if you do have to see it in the dark:

Still needs all stitching to be done. Hopefully, I'll have these finished up tomorrow in time to post one to Devon & Kyle. (Hmmm - I'm wondering if I ever showed you the first one that I finished up for their December mini. . .)

And here's a shot of Marissa and her friends before they went out to their senior-year Snowball Dance last night. Good times!! Apropos name, with over a foot of snow still out there on the ground.

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Anyway, Let us know if you've done any BOM or QAL work recently!

An InLinkz Link-up

BOMs Away - Allietare & December

Yes! You're in the right place for BOMs Away Monday.

Are you getting excited for Christmas? I am.  :)

This week's BOM time was spent working on Allietare Clue 2 and on the first mini of a year-long gift. 

I cut all the pieces out for Clue 2 of Allietare, sewed one set of the units up, and tucked everything away with a note in a zippy until after the holidays. Looking forward to when it gets its sewing time!  Thank you again to Bonnie Hunter for this year's Mystery.

Go "HERE" for Bonnie's current listing of "Allietare!" mystery details and to find specifics of sizes and numbers of units. I'm linking my smidge of work on her Linky for this week, here: Allietare Part 2 Link-Up

As for the Gift BOM, right now I can only give you a peek:

I'm really happy with how it turned out.  :)

I was also really happy yesterday - It was Belt Test Day at the dojang, and we three got our red belts. I feel like it's our first step of really getting there. I love the hanboks that people wear sometimes for these occasions.

Master Lee really surprised me when he called me up to join Leadership. He always gives red roses to people, young and old, when they are given invitations. 

I love all the fantastic people we've met through Taekwondo. You can't find better folks.  :)

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How about you? - Did you work on BOMs this past week or so? 

An InLinkz Link-up

WIP Wed - Wedding free-motion fun, and DOD AMericana Scrap Attack

My fingers are a little too cold to do precise free-motion quilting work on my domestic machine right now, so I though I'd make a WIP post.

I'm finished now with a huge load of Henry Glass projects, which will get shared in a couple of weeks, so I'm back to my normal priority and break-work routines. 

The priority is Devon and Kyle's wedding quilt. I have a good start on the initial stitch-in-the-ditch work. All the white ribbons are outlined, and all but 3 pair of the birds. My thread order arrived for the colors I didn't already have on hand, so I can attack the rings any time now.

Devon liked the motif that's traced into the centers of the rings, so I bought the digital set. The really fun part is that I could draw out her engagement ring's pattern to fit the melons very nicely, and it plays right along with the professional set. When I'm working on those parts and you can see better what I'm talking about, I'll look up the name and link for you. All the outer blue will be an organic blend of feathers, breezes, and motif uses from the digital set. That's still several weeks away, though, so I don't have to face that intimidation just yet. 

I'm not giving as much priority time to this right now as I usually do for priority finishes, though. That's because on Sunday I got working on that week's Block of the Month focus, which is the DOD Americana quilt-along that I'm using for Scott's Air Force retirement quilt for next summer. I'm using only scraps and stash, which means this happens once a month when I work on this project:

The scrap bin gets pawed through and dumped out, three McKenna Ryan left-overs boxes get opened, and potentially relevant FQs and yardages from stash get pulled into the work area. Usually it lasts only one day. This time, it stayed out because I didn't want a third row sitting around partially finished. (The last row really intimidated me when it came time to trace out those military settings for the fusible pieces and then having to find fabrics that will work for each thing. So it sat, incomplete, all this time.)

This. Drives. Me. NUTS!!!!!  I am far from a great housekeeper, preferring greatly to work on quilts than to do dishes or mop floors. And I am comfortable in a certain level of daily lived-in, yet organized "mess". This, however, is pure chaos. So I can't focus for more than an hour in a day on the wedding quilt until this project is caught up and everything is re-binned and tucked nicely into my storage room again.

Here is what I accomplished the last two days. It's 11 x 62 inches finished size, and was a super fun row to put together:

If you're familiar with this QAL, you'll see that I changed it up a bit, and I showed that in my last post. 

Here are the two previous rows that still need attention: 

The birdhouses will be simple. That row just needs some door holes, a few birds. and an Uncle Sam hat or two.  The military row - oh, boy. That one is going to be challenging and demanding. I'm going to ask Scott for a Scrap-Attack date tonight and have him help me pull out pieces that will work for the various vignettes from Bosnia, Korea, Oman, and Afghanistan. The central office one I should be able to handle on my own. By week's end I want this finished and scraps squared away! I need my peace of mind back for the FMQ intensity!  Also - other family members would be really happy to be able to use the pool table again! Can we just say: #800dollarquiltstagingtable #kindacrazy

I've finished enough older UFOs now that my scrap bin is cram-packed. So I finally started sorting the mess into divisions as I was working on the church last night. So far there's "Brown-and-Such" and "Black-and-Gray" pulled out of the main mess. I'll divide the rest into maybe 4 more sub-bins as Scott and I pull things out for his personal row. I guess I need to swing by Home Depot to get a bunch of storage bins that will work for this system, since I know I'll continue working with scraps periodically.

I hope your week is going well and your work space is happier than mine right now!!  :D

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Linking up at WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, WIPs Be Gone

Finish Report: - "Semper Fi - Combass"

This quilt was finished in August, but it never got its own report:

That is still my favorite photo of it! It was taken outside the hospital in Grand Island, Nebraska, when Marissa and Scott and I went to visit his mother. It is 70 x 70 inches. When the quilt finally catches up with its Marine, I hope to get some great shots to add a new favorite photo.

I designed this quilt myself on my EQ6. It needed to fit what I could find in my stash that worked around a Marine Corps yardage and panel that I bought on ebay when my now son-in-law reported to Basic Training in March. He lived with us as a de-facto foster son for six months before that, and I needed a project to occupy my Mama Bear heart during the three months he was there. 

Our Guy, front of second photo from the top on the right.
Love that look of determination.

Basic Training for the U.S. Marine Corps is the single hardest and longest troop training in the world. It is physically and mentally grueling beyond what most people (and their bodies) can endure. And during that time, there is extremely limited communication with your loved one by snail mail. Which is usually greatly delayed. It is not fun on either end.

I even hung it up during construction progress as a comfort factor.

So I needed this project! The quilting was probably only half way finished when he graduated, but he still had to go to the three weeks of Combat Training after that, and now he's at the nine months of his job training school where he has to live in the barracks. 

Kyle, bottom left

So his quilt won't live with him until March or April, when he has his first Fleet assignment and he and Devon have their own housing unit.

(Still loving how beautiful their wedding was in June!)

I had fun with this design.

You definitely have to have RED for a Marine Corps quilt. Black is another good color, as is gold. It's all very distinctive from the other military forces. But they do work a lot with the classic camouflage in both forest and desert color ways. I had a few greens in my stash to work with, so that's what planned on. The star band features two kinds of stars in two different forest-family greens with fussy cuts from the Marines yardage for the centers. 

I needed cool but not-super-dense quilting on those. The side stars (above) were stitched in the ditch, and then the background just got straight lines that vaguely connote all the barbed wire Kyle had to crawl through and drag dead weight under during training. The corner stars (below) got a little tighter quilting. They have SID, curved echos inside the arms, and medium meandering in the background to add a little more nuance of camouflage fabric to the dark leafy print.

Further out, there's the gold bar band with a woven camouflage element. I had two cool fat quarters for the greens here, and piecing it template-style with a gazillion Y-seams let that be just barely enough. It took forever! But I sure am happy with the result. It's nice that the design pieces aren't broken up into 2 or 3 pieces each for faster construction. This band's joining to the quilt-in-progress ended up providing a serendipitous change to my initial design work. I cut the red band between it and the stars the tiniest bit too narrow. I didn't have enough fabric to recut that, so the problem-solve was to add a 1/4 inch strip on either side of the band work. You can see in the photo below that this is perfect! The points undoubtedly look much nicer framed completely in black rather than kissing the red like they would have done. Sometimes mistakes are actually blessings in disguise, so I've learned to take them in stride and embrace the problem-solve necessity as an opportunity for improvement or artistic expression.

Oh! Here's a detail shot of the gold bar that shows almost completely how nicely that gold thread glistens. 

I'd wanted to use a particular decorative stitch on my machine to do the edge work on the bar's quilting. It would have helped create an effect of roundness for it. But the stitch was too complicated for a metallic thread, no matter how carefully and slowly I worked it. So I resorted to the blanket stitch. Still not thrilled with how that looks like it was appliqued on, but. . . oh, well for that. Doesn't take away from the quilt's overall awesomeness!


Back to the main focal point: The center medallion, a fabric printing of the Marine Corps Seal, has trapunto work. The dimension turned out so terrific! I used a layer of quality poly batt for this, and it's cut out from the red area. The black ring has the least quilting, so it puffs the most. The rope ring and the eagle-anchor-globe have much denser quilting than that, so they lie a little lower, but still raised from the main level. I did need something dense in the closest background area, so filled that yellow with a small meander. The denseness counteracted the immediate-surrounding rippling from the trapunto center so that the rest of the quilt lies flat, even before washing and blocking.

I was super happy with the detail quilting here, following those very thin lines. The gold thread is fantastic in that accent, though you can't really see it much here. A year ago there would have been lots of wobbles in my FMQ showing there. But the thin gold line is perfectly edged with gold, and the thin black ring and all the detail work on the rope ring and the central motif run true to the mark. Very exciting moment for me! I did decide NOT to detail quilt the words in the black ring, because that would have broken its dimensionality. Much better this way.

Also, I used the gold thread to quilt his name in the red band above the seal, and "Semper Fi" below it. It glistens beautifully in this field! I needed a quilting filler between those words, so I put in a chevron for him since he graduated with an early promotion to Private First Class.

I had a really difficult time deciding what to do for the quilting in the red bands. I found the perfect free stars and feathers motif, but I had to resize it twice for the bands, and then make templates that I could center and trace. I can't do a motif like this on my domestic machine without marking and keep it evenly spaced/sized with the tiny visual field you have to work in. 

I was amazed at how nicely the corners worked on these bands. I really only needed to draw in a couple extra feathers as the stars took care of themselves, laying down in perfect spacing all on their own. However, it took me a couple painstaking drawing hours to work out nice upper and lower curls for the central band, where the name and motto break the border design apart. Some things definitely do NOT come easily for me!

The backing was made with the Marine Corps yardage. I didn't have enough to match the pictures down the center seam, so I just inserted some of the green from the front. 

This is the label I'm sewing on it today before I take it to get appraised next week:

It's finally all dry now from the washing and blocking! It's appropriate that the only place to lay it out was in the exercise bay! I'm telling you, those Marines have the best hard bodies from all their PT!! 

Thanks for letting me share this special quilt with you. It's one of my top-three favorites, and I'll really hate letting it go!

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Linking up at:

Fabric Tuesday

Cath's Bits and Bobs

Free Motion Mavericks

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

TGIFF, which is at Quokka Quilts this week

 (main site here)

This is my very best Q3 Finish Along piece (My goal post link)

WIP - Henry Glass & Wedding Quilt

Today's priority work: Lots of this going on for a fabric company, yielding gifting power for Christmas.  And an opportunity to pull out my serger - its tensions are now all very happy contrary to some of this pic's evidence.  ;D 

And most of the ribbons on Devon & Kyle's wedding quilt have had the background trimmed away. Hoping to get the rest of those cut out today so I can start in on the 24 birds. Very nerve-wracking, but it improves the hand of the quilt (how it "flows" and how it quilts up).

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Linking up at WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, WIPs Be Gone