Another Flimsy Alert! ~ Ollie's Owl

 "Little Owl" by Bound Company

38 x 44 inches

This was the "Ooo! Shiny!" project for late-winter 2022, an adorable crib quilt for our grandson. It's intended for his first birthday in the fall, so I'll be quilting it after a couple large quilts move off my longarm queue - which is currently stalled while we find a way to get my MdDS under more control.

Mal de Debarquement Syndrome is alternately amusing, maddening, and debilitating. It's never gone, just better or worse. I'm on week 7 of this challenge. "Ain't Nobody Got Time For That!" 

Illustration by Aykut Aydoğdu

Flimsy Alert! ~ Feathered Goose

 "Feathered Goose" - 60 x 60 inches

This is an oldie-but-goodie retired pattern from Judy Niemeyer. I'd purchased the kit sometime between Jan 2010 and Oct 2011, and it just sat in my storage room for a whole decade! So much gorgeousness just sitting there neglected.

So, in June 2020, I decided to wash the fabrics and cut everything out so I could use this as a stitch-off pile. I never saw it as a Work-In-Progress, so it didn't add to my list of things to do. It was simply a way to avoid having the hold the loose threads behind the presser foot every time I started a string of "real" work, and to one day have a cool bonus quilt top suddenly appear from nowhere!

Yesterday was that day!

My methodology for this: I'd prep as many paper piecing units as I could, then leave them in a stack to the left of my work area. When I finished sewing a chain of units of the priority project, I'd grab the top unit from my stitch-off pile and send it through. I'd leave that one on the threads behind my presser foot when I walked away with my real work, and the machine would be ready and waiting for the next chain of work without having to hold thread ends to start it up. 

Each time I clipped off my chain of work, there'd be one stich-off piece finished, and that went on the slowly growing stack to the right of my work area. When I ran out of prepped pieces, I'd carry the whole sewn stack to the iron, press those, prep them for their next addition, and restock my stitch-off pile. 

The last few weeks, that's been a pile of joining seams to sew up rather than paper piecing units, and now: Voila! A beautiful full-fledged Flimsy that was never scheduled to be worked on!  And one more UFO advanced to this stage. 

The whole operation worked so well, I just finished cutting out and organizing the Fire Island Hosta kit that I'd bought in 2015 - and has sat on my NETY list since then. (meaning: Not Even Touched Yet) This is a larger quilt, and it barely fits in my tote box for this purpose! 

I'm off to prep the first stack of stitch-off work from this don't-even-think-about-it UFO project, and then I'll get cracking on this week's Block of the Month focus.

(BOMs Away Monday is now on Facebook)

Flimsy Alert! ~ 2021 Temperature Quilt

My 2021 Temperature Quilt measures 57.5 x 60.5 inches

If you've had thoughts of doing a temperature quilt, there's a really terrific group for that on Facebook: Twiddletails Temperature Quilt Along. Don't let the name fool you - this is an open-play group where lots of people are doing their own thing. Tons of amazing ideas in there!

For mine, I used the 2" Perfect Circles templates to turn the edges under, glued them onto 3.5" squares, and then used a teeny tiny blanket stitch with my silk hand applique threads to stitch them down. I used paper off my newsprint end-roll as a stabilizer for that, so when each stack was stitched, I then got more TV time to pull the papers off, tie the ends, and snip out the background from under the dots.

I used the back-basting method to do turned-edge hand applique for all the words, and the 1.25 inch template to turn edges under from background cut-outs of all the lower temperatures. I had to cut fresh circles from my fabrics for everything above 71 degrees (our "hottest" night last year). We had a pretty mild summer last year - never over 95, so I didn't get to use the whisper pink or blinding white colors that I'd planned for 96-99 and 100+.  Our lowest low was -14. Nice huge range, but you can see by the fairly uniform background colors that our nights stay cool even when we get 95-degree days.  (They do that even when we get 104-degree days, but you can't see that in action for 2021.) 

And that is why we don't have the expense of an AC installation or maintenance up here in our little micro-climate! There really are only a couple of days during the summertime when you catch yourself thinking, "yeah, air conditioning would be nice right now."  But that only lasts a couple of hours before the ceiling fan and open windows clear out the heat again as the temperature nosedives into the evening.

But then the trade-off is the need to run humidifiers all winter, because the heater on top of an already-dry climate sucks the tiny bit of moisture we do have right out of the air so that we'll get 12% humidity in here without the humidifiers. So you fill their tanks, run them, clean them periodically, refill, repeat ad nauseum. I still like this climate so much better than the Florida climate we used to live in.  :)  

That makes another opening in my active BOM rotation, and I have the perfect colorful project to slip in: Alaska Rainbow!

This was my birthday purchase last August, and it's one of the extremely rare times that I've bought a pre-cut BOM kit. Check out its gorgeous box! I'll certainly be re-using this when the project is all sewn up!

I hope you are having a good week!

BOMs Away - Two Flimsies!

 

BOMs Away - Heather & Pat's documentation panels and some Affairs of the Heart

                    

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 put my hustle on this weekend and scored TWO flimsies in my BOM projects!

Saturday I wrapped up Heather & Pat's love birds Temperature Quilt top:

It is 96.5 x 106 inches, and I have some fancy-pants quilting planned for it. There are 3 quilts ahead of it at my longarm, though.

Sunday I put the last borders onto my Neptune's Gift:

This is 86 inches square, and I have no idea when it will get a turn on the longarm. Hopefully not too long from now, because it's amazing. 

Interestingly, my stitch-off project, Feathered Goose, also wrapped up this weekend! In fact, there were exactly as many units left to stitch a seam on as I had rounds of sewing on those two BOM tops. Kinda fun, actually!  This goes onto my domestic machine priority list to put the top together when I sew during the work week. It was very much a Happy Dance weekend!

(Except, now I have to prep whatever will be my next stitch-off project - but, boy are there plenty untouched kits in the storage room to choose from . . . )

I've organized the next BOM that I'm going to pull into my rotation since two are now off my list. Here are my colors (selected from left-overs from my Rainbow Dear Jane BOM from years ago) for Cadence Court, by Sassafras Lane:

I had almost everything I need in my stash, but I do need to pick up a couple yards of assorted blacks to augment my background and binding yardage. 

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I have an announcement to make regarding BOMs Away Mondays. 

Subscription prices keep going up everywhere, including the one for having linky parties on your blog. After April, BOMs Away will no longer be held in this format. Instead, it is moving to a Facebook group! 

Kate and I will continue posting linky parties here each week for one more month, but you can also already access the new location:

BOMs Away! - Quilters' block-of-the-month motivation

The group is set up as a private group, meaning only members will see your posts there, and we will be screening requests to join the group so that spammers won't get in and drive us all nuts. One great thing about this move is that we can post progress any time we want, and you won't be left hanging if we've gone on vacation and forgot to set up an auto post with a linky party for you.

We hope to see you over there. I know I would not get a tenth the amount of BOM work done that I do without having this little "association" to post to. 

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Did you work on a BOM type project this week? 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.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Flimsy Alert! ~ "Heart & Home"

I just realized that I haven't recorded the finish of the top for the "Heart & Home" BOM.

This is probably my favorite spot.  :)

I got the final borders finished up a couple of weeks ago while I was using it as the masking project to hide my secret work. 

This was a pattern from The Quilt Company, and I received the BOM packets in 2009. It's happiness to have it sewn up after it sat untouched for so many years! 

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Linking up at:

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

 

Link-a-Finish Friday

 

TGIFF is at Simply Pieced this week
 (main site here)

Flimsy Alert! ~ "Lori & Aliya"

This is my first commission quilt - I'm not at a point in time yet where I'm ready to take those on in any regularity, but when a friend that good asks, you see if you can do it.  :) 

A fantastic friend from our Florida days wants a red and white quilt with gray minkee backing that features quilting of cameos of her super-cool German shepherd, Aliya. So we used Pinterest to find a design she liked, and we settled on the "Metro Hoops" pattern, with a uniform red background instead of the two-tone.

I ended up constructing this top differently from the pattern, because I wanted the cameo fields to be seam-free, and the diamond pops of the black print to be one piece instead of four corners sewn together. I also wanted a larger size than the 3x3 grid would yield.

It wasn't terribly hard to figure out how to work it - that Quick Curve Ruler is awesome! I just made curve bars to insert with squares of background and accent. The worst part was getting my history-writing saturated brain to work the math reliably to upsize the rings.

I have to say, if you are happy with the modern wedding ring shape and want/need to piece a top in much greater speed than the tradition wedding ring pieces let you do, this ruler is a FANTASTIC way to go. 

 

The fabrics were fun to work with since they have a modern pop to them, despite the atypical red background. Technology is awesome, since camera photos make it easy to share findings with a distant commissionee to see what they do and don't like!

I actually finished the top in something like early August, when I had zero time for non-academic writing. Now I'm finally getting to its report. Lori asked if we can wait a few months before doing the quilting so she can save up for the custom job, which fits perfectly with my quilting time/priorities at the moment. Sometime in January I'll start on that part. I'll put different cameos of Aliya inside the nine rings, developed from photographs that Lori's been taking. I'm not certain yet what I'll put in the spaces between the rings, but her paw prints will be worked into the quilting of the outer edge areas. I extended the background beyond the rings (another departure from the Metro Hoops pattern) to give space for that and to make a little more snuggling room under the nine rings.

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Linking up at:

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

 

Link-a-Finish Friday

 

TGIFF is at Quilt Matters this week
 (main site here)
 

Fabric Tuesday