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.)

Oh!  You guys, forgive me for forgetting to post the BOMs Away link up on time!

We are running like chickens without heads these days. . . 

Closing next Monday on this cute little house for Heather and Pat to move into:

Fitting my sister's out-of-nowhere wedding this Saturday into the chaos:

Frantically rehabilitating our yard before the HOA fines us:

Every bed looked like this
last one that I have to do
as soon as the thunder stops.

Turning into pretty stuff.
We have a very late flower season here -
actually still pushing the hail possibility.

All while getting the moving process in motion.

Like I said, chickens with no heads!  :D

Zero quilting work whatsoever happening here right now.

~*~*~*~

How about you? Have you done work on your BOMs lately?

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

WIP - yeah, yeah, yeah - Haven't I learned not to sew late at night? ;D

Crimeny Crickets.  

LOL. I thought I'd learned already that it is not a good thing at all for me to use my sewing machine after 9:15.  (We get up stinkin' early around here.)

First time I've done this binding snafu.  :)
Can you see on that black that I lined up the folded edge
instead of the raw edges?

So today's WIP is unpicking the seven feet of backward-attached binding. On a minkee quilt, no less! I even went around a corner before my brain finally noticed it and called it quits for the night.

Spending some quality time with my frogger friend.
"Rip-it, Rip-it"  

And a fun WIP for the new place - 

We have this super-high 15-foot wall in the house, so my Hubby-Man put up a pulley system for me to be able to display quilts up there and change them out without fighting the weight on a scary-tall ladder every time.

I was impressed that he thought to put potholders on the ladder's tops to keep them from marring the wall. Pretty good thinking for a man!  ;D 

We bought decorative curtain rods to put up on each side of the wall. This side is the piano parlor, the other is the family room.

On this side I'll hang the huger quilts. Patriots in Petticoats will go up as soon as I have its sleeve stitched on. For now, we lugged Sailing with the Flying Needles up there. It's a 90-incher. One day I'll have everything unpacked and all these piles here and there will be GONE.  :)  One day we'll also have decor up. Even a quilt by itself, though, makes it so much homier.

I ran out of discretionary money before I could buy some pretty cording that will fade into the wall, so a $1.50 pack of clotheslining will stand in for a couple of weeks. 

This armoire knob will also stand in until I can find the perfect tie-off hook to install on the wall. It'll be awesome when it's all finished.  :D

And the whole while Scott was working, this fella kept an eye on events through the window.

Thank you to Lee and this week's host for facilitating this motivation link-up!

BOM's Away 9 Sep 2012 - Busy Unpacking the Essentials

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Another week of no stitching. Hopefully you've been able to work on your BOM and/or interval project!

BOMs Away Monday - 2 Sep 2012

BOMs Away Monday - 2 Sep 2012

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Haven't sewn a stitch all week. How are your BOMs and interval projects going?

TGIFF Flimsy Alert! - Quiet Rebellion on the Pond

One last UFO significantly advanced on its way to being completely shot down! 

"Quiet Rebellion on the Pond" is now a full-fledged flimsy.

All those geese tried mighty hard to fly away!

I know *exactly* how I want to quilt this, but I don't have the capacity at the moment. Hopefully I can get it on a longarmer's wait list soon.  :)

Considering we had to sell a home and then moved across the country, I'm feeling really great about how many large-quilt projects were brought to flimsy stage before my semester started up.

Tomorrow just after 11am, this flimsy's photo op site will be the northern boundary of my neighborhood!! 

And today, Scott and I have been married for 23 years!!!!! We didn't even realize it is our anniversary until we were halfway to the interstate to take Devon's stuff back up to school (90 minutes away). We high-5'd each other across the truck, figuring a new home was a most excellent anniversary gift!

So Devi is now happily ensconced in Buckingham Palace . . .  

er . . . Hall.

With this beauty right outside her building.

And doing exciting things already, like driving a ZAMBONI!  How cool is that?! (She's working at the university's ice rink this year.)

~*~*~

Check out what the others are whooping it up about at Whoop! Whoop!, Richard and Tanya's place, and TGIFF.

BOM's Away - 22 July 2012 - 2000, Jane!

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Sometimes I crack me up.  :D


Here are the Jane Babies I finished this week. They were all from my hand-work tote.

You can see that I keep a chart and piece-count for my Rainbow Jane over on my left sidebar. Well, when I entered the piece counts for this week's finishes on the spreadsheet, it told me I was up to 1992 pieces. So tempting to round it up. But yesterday I prepped the next double-set of Babies to work on (the rest of the catch-up, by the way, woohoo!) and right now I am SICK TO DEATH of Jane. 


However, That "1992" just bugged me. It was like it was saying "Neener, neener, neener!" being so close to a perfectly even 2000. So I pulled my Jane Box out of the bureau drawer and fished out all the loose finished Babies.  

Then I gritted my teeth and sewed 8 sashing pieces on (and ONLY 8) so I could get that spreadsheet total to 2000.


Silly me.  :D    But I'm not going to sew anymore Jane stuff today. Machine or hand. She can just cool her jets for a day or two.   Maybe I'll take the family to Batman instead. And a bike ride along Cottonwood Creek Trail. And maybe we'll try some disc golf on that public course along the trail. Oh, wait - Scott says those aren't frisbies they use, but real-live golf discs, which are a little bit different. Maybe we'll have to try that some other day - Something to look forward to.


But, OH!!!!  Thursday morning we suddenly had competing offers come in on our Florida house! I was astonished at how fast it resolved into a contract on the house. So Friday we spent the day looking at the last few houses here on my list and then re-visiting our top two favorites. We put an offer in late that night. Yesterday morning I woke up to find that they had signed our offer with no quibbles!!  I am a Happy Woman.  :D  If all goes well, this will be my new front door on August 22nd:

and I'll be sewing in this basement on August 23rd:

Because let's be real - I'm not waiting until we're all unpacked to do more sewing. . .   ;D

~*~*~*~

Have you made progress on any of your BOMs or interval projects? Link up here to show it off! :D    

Another Flimsy Alert!

I'm so excited to finally - finally! - be able to post for TGIFF and Whoop Whoop!

The dust has settled, our Florida home is entering a contract today, and we're happily ensconced in a really pretty apartment complex while we finish one last homes-viewing round before starting our own purchase procedure for a Colorado home, hopefully putting an offer in this evening (exciting!).

I'm in love with the way Colorado Springs nestles against the mountains
with Pike's Peak in the background. That snowcap is gone right now,
having been first muddied and then melted during the nasty fires.

Last Friday I finished my Glacier Star quilt top, but couldn't post for TGIFF because we didn't get photos until Saturday. What a fantastic shot we got, though! Garden of the Gods is a spectacular place to go, and was a very popular place to shoot a quilt. (I wrote about that two posts ago.)  This is a Judy Niemeyer pattern, and I used a fabric kit from Quilting by the Bay in Panama City, FL.

If that isn't fun enough, this morning I got the corners mitered and put in the last stitch on my Coral Encounter. I'm in love.  :)

Didn't we luck out with our Google-based apartment search?
That's a square quilt - wind just wouldn't cooperate!

This quilt is made with the Judy Niemeyer Drunkard's Path paper piecing pattern, but I put the colors together myself to reflect the impression it gave me of a patch of brain coral underwater. It turned out gorgeous, and I plan to have a lot of fun with the quilting once we're into a house and I have real sewing space again.  (not to mention my batting, which is all in a box deeeeeep inside storage)

BOMs Away Monday - July 1, 2012 - Moved to Colorado

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

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

Well, I am now a Colorado Girl!  [Weekly Link-up is at the bottom of this journal entry]

Concert Grand gets loaded truck-to-truck using their lift

A family of 5 creative people in a house for 15 years accumulates a LOT of stuff!  We packed every bit of non-sitting space in all of the vehicles, crammed that UHaul 26-footer for all its worth, and still had to add the largest UHaul trailer to get it all together. 




As we were pulling out, our youngest said "We're a train, Mom!" It made me think of our ancestors crossing westward in wagon trains, and our convoy fit the analogy quite well, I thought:


Marissa and I had the Hand Cart in the lead - along with all 4 cats! (yes, *that* was interesting)

Devon had the little Pack Mule

Heather and Grandpa had the big Pack Mule (THANK YOU, THANK YOU DAD FOR FLYING OUT AND HELPING US!!!)

And Scott drew up the rear with the Covered Wagon (better known as "The Squid"), pulling the final mule.

Convoy driving across the country can be quite demanding! The second night, our 18yo said, "Mom, I had a Wooten Moment! I always wondered what the heck was wrong with you guys, how could you be so tired when all you did was sit and drive all day. Well - - I Get It Now!"  hehe


That Squid was funny, but it sure was AGGRAVATING, too. The darn thing got a blow-out THREE times during the trip - always the same tire. I was expecting something, as the tires were almost completely bald (shame on U-Haul!), and Grandpa said the subsequent blow-outs were undoubtedly because they simply put a new tire on the one that had blown, with a full inch more of tread than the other 3 tires on that axle, so that the new tire had to carry far more than its fair share of the load. It was truly maddening. But it did provide some awesome photo ops:

Giant Squid Attacks Mechanic

The first time we had a great place to wait during the 2-something hours it took to get the roadside service: in the Sunday-empty parking lot of the Arkansas State Highway Patrol headquarters.  LOL

The second time was on a busy stretch of Interstate with no good waiting areas, so Scott sent us on ahead to the next hotel. He caught up with us at 1 am.  :(  He did get some entertainment, though, watching the 2-car speed trap that the Oklahoma highway patrol set up near him.


The third time was in the BOONIES of the northeast corner of New Mexico. We watched a train go by. 

. . . and Scott sent the rest of us 45 minutes ahead to pass some time at Capulin National Volcano.

Capulin National Volcano

Grandpa and Heather

We pulled into Colorado Springs at midnight just as the fire was approaching its apex. This is what the mountains looked like the next day across the city. And each afternoon for three days, the wind blew that cloud of smoke all the way across the city to encase us all.

Smoke covering the mountains from the out-of-control Waldo Canyon Fire

Fortunately, our apartment was on the opposite side of the city from the mountains, and our storage unit was across the Interstate from the threat zone. Others were not so fortunate at all. The whole time we were unloading at the storage facility, other families were arriving and unloading everything they had been able to save when they had to evacuate their homes. Over 30,000 people were displaced by this fire!!  If we had been able to use the base temporary facility (cats kept us out of it), we would have had to evacuate 12 hours after arriving. Almost 350 homes were burned this week. It is heart-wrenching to see in my new home-town.

Our second night here - Fire was visible on the city side of the mountains.

A scenic pull-out on I-25 just north of the city was a favorite place for people to watch horror-stricken as the helicopters did everything they could to save the homes.

But the neighborhood we'd wanted to buy into is mostly gone:

When Scott had to report for duty Friday after the Air Force Academy opened back up, his sponsor still didn't know if his home had been burned down. I don't know if base-housing had opened back up yet. 

Fire behind the Academy chapel

I'm so glad we had brought an earlier trailer load out here in May and got to see our new home as it should be before this fire destroyed the mountains. We'll still enjoy it, though, and the mountains will recover slowly. I hope the families who lost their homes get all the help they need to recover. In fact, I think one of my blog-communicators lived right in the canyon where this fire started, and i sure hope she's OK. 

Speaking of fellow quilters, tomorrow I'll be quilt-shop hopping, and the next week I'll start visiting local guilds to find where I can fit in and to hopefully meet some new friends.  :)  Quilters are awesome.

And now on to BOMs AWAY business:

I did get two Baby Janes finished since my last in-person posting:

E-7

RS-2

Have you made progress on any of your BOMs or interval projects? Link up here to show it off! :D