TGIFF Is Here This Week - What a Hoot, Marissa!

Hi! Welcome to this week's "Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday" link-up! Have you finished something lately that you'd like to share? Link up at the bottom of this post, and be sure to visit a few links to help your quilting peers celebrate their finishes.  :D

This is a super fun finish for our family. "What a Hoot, Marissa!" is the last in a series of three quilts made for our daughters as each of them graduated from high school!

This was my first original quilt design, and when I made the first one in 2010, it provided the basis for my blog's name as that was when I started recording my quilting endeavors here. The first two had one more row so they'd be a good length for the extra-long twin beds of college freshman dorms. This one fits Marissa's needs better in a regular length, and it's done to a 70 x 90 inch size. I *loved* the backing fabric I found for it!

Marissa chose her school colors for the checkerboards, and the owls were appliqued with satin stitching. I get the best result with this approach when I pin a layer of unprinted newsprint behind it to stabilize the fabric and keep puckers and ripples away. (I got a free "endroll" from a county newspaper a few years ago, which had yards and yards and yards of remnant.) It tears away so easily, it's no big deal at all to remove! I also clip away back layers to take away extra bulk and stiffness in the finished quilt.

Every so often, I get really picky about how I construct a quilt. On these, I adore the Celtic ribbon corners and didn't want the easier way of putting them together using HSTs as end-caps that would cut up the flow of the ribbons. So the fabric was cut in a way that uses a lot of Y seams and puzzle-piecing to put them together in a way that preserves the continuity of the ribbons. They look terrific in the finished product!

Another fun thing about these quilts is the button eyes that really liven the owls up. Yes, it takes a while to sew them all on. Not my favorite part, but definitely worth the effort.

The first two "What a Hoot" quilts were quilted by a guild co-member when we lived in Florida. This time around, I'm completely comfortable doing my own quilting, so this was completely finished by me. 

The inner field is quilted exactly the same as her sisters' had been done. But I didn't have the computerized system to easily measure out the Celtic style geometric design quilted in the wide border of the earlier versions, so I marked a spine all the way around and free-hand quilted feathers for that space.

Wow, am I happy with how those turned out!

Almost as happy as this remarkable young woman was to graduate.  :D  Love this huge grin of accomplishment!

Right now this fabulous quilt is hanging in our great room, where Marissa can bask in recognition all summer, and anyone who comes into the house can help us continue to celebrate. Soon she'll be starting her university studies, so I suppose we'll change it out. But for now, it makes me smile every day!

Oh yeah! And guess where half of the binding was stitched down? - In Hawaii! Specifically on a balcony on Waikiki, Oahu, and another balcony on Ka'anapali, Maui during sun breaks. Definitely worth lugging that heavy puppy in my carry-on from Colorado and back. . .   ;D

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Now it's your turn to toot your horn and let us help you celebrate a finish! Link up right here.  :) 

An InLinkz Link-up

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

WIP - 3D Construction with Pals, and a Birthday!

Needed a break from the machine for a little bit, so I thought I'd put up a WIP Wednesday post. 

Well, first I snuck a sliver of left-over birthday cake from last night. Yum!  Our youngest is officially a young adult now. Yeah - I admit that made me feel middle-aged finally! Good thing I'm immature, so I don't really think I'm that old.  ;D

She wanted a lazy go-to-school-in-your-sweats day, so she didn't want pictures taken. I had fun doing things like stringing 18 pink roses up the stairs for her to gather, putting a few balloons here and there for her to find, with a little red-and-white rose bouquet and a card where she likes to sit in the family room. And doesn't every girl need a moose to pick her up from school with a love monkey and some snowmen brownies when Mom comes to take her out to lunch?  :)  

Before this break, I finished the initial construction of these large 3D panels, which gave me a LOT of leader/ender action for several other projects, including my "Allietari" part 1 HSTs (all are sewn, about 1/3 are cut apart, and maybe 1/5 are pressed open and seen here), some circles I need for a Christmas project, and some of the work on rays for the "Parasol" kit I bought back in March or April. 

Those panels have a ton of 1/2"-finished flap rows that could have been nasty if I'd gotten my math wrong or botched the precision sewing. (You can see the oversized ends I put in just in case I needed extra fabric when I attach them.) But laying them out so far, they're spot on!  Now I need to put my engineer hat back on and figure out how to get the twists all nice and pretty, secured, and incorporated the way I want in the project they're for. . . 

Linking up at WIP Wednesday, Let's Bee Social, Cath's Design Board

BOMs Away - Late Edition

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.

I'm sorry I completely forgot about posting for BOMs Away the other night. It was a strange week for our family. Thursday morning, I was pin-basting "Plums in November" between 20-minute-spaced stirrings of my simmering oat groats. The timer rang, I planted my hand on the floor to get up (a cumbersome process with a half-healed hip flexor), and the next thing I knew, my brain was saying, "Whaat the hell?" while coming to with a nasty-painful jaw/neck/head, and a hand coming away from my neck with fresh and half-congealed blood on it. It's all been assigned to not having eaten yet, being dehydrated, and fainting. In the fall, I landed squarely on the wings of a fairy lamp in the window sill, which effected a strong upper cut to the jaw accompanied with a good stabbing there. I had to spend the entire day at the ER while they made sure I hadn't had a heart attack to cause the fainting (because I had zero memory of any light-headedness), and to do stitches on the gaping wound. 

Isn't is lucky that I wasn't working on a white-based quilt? Non of the blood stains is findable on this.  :)   And it amuses me that the broken fairy wings that knocked me out are color-coordinated.

Always the competitive one, my sister over in Idaho had almost the same experience on Sunday morning!!  She fainted in the shower, fell, and knocked herself out with a blow to the back of the head on the counter. So she got to spend the entire day at the ER checking for heart attack and brain bleeding with the concussion she got. No stitches, though.  :)

It was so bizarre that this happened to both of us in a couple days' span. Neither one of us has been in the ER more than one other time, years and years and years ago. We don't have any similar health issues or blood work clues. Just weird~!

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So anyway, I didn't feel like working on Wind in the Whiskers with all that going on. Did you guys work on your BOMs?  

An InLinkz Link-up

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)

BOMs Away - Rebellion (er - Avoidance) & Copyright Receipt

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.

I did not want to fuss with the tracing and tracing and tracing and cutting-cutting-cutting, then meticulous placement on fabric of dozens to hundreds of tiny pieces that "Wind in the Whiskers" requires right now. So I threw my BOM schedule out the window this time.

Instead, lots of good work happened with this! Which pulls an old, old kit off the NETY list. It's a flimsy now. :D

and with this community service top as the leader-ender! It's a flimsy now, too.  :)

(More on those later in the week)

And then I wanted SOMETHING to be done on at least one of the BOMs in my rotation, so I scanned in my Scott sketches and printed them out in reverse so I can trace them all. Hopefully by week's end I will have all that done and fabrics chosen from the scrap bin explosion. Then I get that cleaned up and put away until the next 3rd-Sunday. That mess on the floor next to the pool table is driving me insane, and it's the whole reason I didn't want to work on the fusible chores of today's scheduled BOM in the first place. Time to suck it up and work my way through that mental block. (It's very difficult to find the right colors, and hard to make it look like it does in my head, so I give in easily to the lure of other things to work on.)

Oh! And look what came in the mail this weekend! My notification of the copyright on my thesis! From last December. lol!!!  (Gotta love that turn-around time.)

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How about you? - Have you worked on any BOMs lately? 

BOMs Away - New Seasons for All the Kids, Americana & Strolling the Block

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 there. It's a time of big changes for the family.

We moved Heather into her apartment up in Denver. . . 

. . . and she is matriculated into medical school now. Long journey to get this far, long journey more.

It's a fun campus. 

Heather and the Giant Peach

I loved this wall art - there was something so captivating about the different shoeprints, interspersed with roller blades, ice skates, bike treads, a soccer ball print, children's prints. It was all done by the class of 2006. I thought it was brilliant.

And even bigger news, she's now engaged to this young man! They're being super nice to us, though, and giving us two years to recover from this spring's wedding.

Other kids: 

Devon and Kyle bought their first car - exciting!

And we had fun with Marissa's senior portraits shoot. School starts back up for her this Wednesday. Can't believe the baby of the family is at this point!  

So - around all this, I did get some BOM work done this week. I sewed up row 2 of the Americana QAL:

I was stumped for the longest time trying to find a fabric to use for the background on this one. But then I caught sight of the tub in the back corner where I've kept a bunch of Scott's older uniforms, so I harvested one of the retired BDUs shirts. 

The value was too dark for the hearts fabrics, so I just edged those with a beige plaid fat quarter I had. I also appliqued them onto a single-piece background instead of piecing the background around the hearts since that stuff is like working with duck cloth canvas. I really love how it turned out!

I also pulled Kelly's quilt back out and finished the free-motion work on the Oct-Nov-Dec row that I was working on when we dropped everything to drive to Nebraska. Getting really close to the finish on this one!

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Hope you were able to find time for some BOM work.