BOMs Away - 4 Feb - Workin' for Kelly

Welcome to my 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 this post.

This week's BOM work was dedicated to Kelly's project. Man! Month 1 on that BOM has a *ton* of work! I only finished half of the sewing for it in my allotted time.

10 six-inch stars: 

There are 8 more stars to make for Month 1. They are larger because they have a second row of "rays".  I'll get those sewn up for her the first week of March.

~*~*~*~*~ 

 What have you guys done on BOMs or interval projects lately? Weeklies are welcome along with regular projects that you’ve broken into monthly units, and –of course- true BOMs.   Share your eye candy and show off your progress since the last time you linked up! There are some wonderful monthly and weekly projects going on out there.  

February Goal Post

Here are my February goals for UFO-busting. Top Three Lineup:


Charity Quilt 3 - A perfect flimsy to try out some FMQ feathers. Been a flimsy since 2011 because it got lost in the stash - found during unpacking. (It's a wheel chair lap quilt.) I want to structure some community sewing such as this into each month. I miss the sessions I did with my Florida guild periodically. 

Amaretto Cottage - Just got home from its trip to Maine where it was stunningly quilted by Margaret Gunn!!  This baby MONSTER is getting bound!  It's ginormous at 112" x 112" (before quilting), so once I get the binding attached, who knows how many evening show sessions it's going to take to stitch down. The flimsy was made a year ago. The UFO status came from the complicated move, not from the quilter!

Hawaiian Etude - Surely this will see its last hand quilting stitches this month.  :)  This has been shoved back into the UFO pile several times when bindings out-ranked it. Been in the works since July, which is really a shame considering how pretty it is and its small size at something like 15 inches.  Hawaiian quilting is intense, though - echoes and echoes and echoes. . . 

I do also have a special gift quilt in progress. Hoping to have it quilted and gifted by month's end. 

And I have a quilt-retreat weekend later in the month that I'm dedicating to catching up my Rainbow Jane. Hopefully this chart will be 3/4 filled by March 1.

Last month was a great one for quilting, as I I took a break from grad school for an apparently much-needed sanity breather in the face of many family challenges. (Plus I couldn't pay for this semester after covering the girls' term fees. . . )  

These were my finishes - 2 UFOs and a gift. Click on the images for their finish stories.

Now I have to get back to the reality grindstone, though. Research for my thesis needs doing and there's a professional conference presentation to do in 5 weeks (my first ever - terrified!!) So I'm hoping I can get my February goals accomplished. Not sure if they were over-ambitious. . . 

Linking up at 

Lynne's Year of the Finished Project:

Carrie's UFO program:

 

Leah's UFO Sunday FMQ:

Finish Report! - Patrick's Houndstooth Blues

There once was an extremely helpful young man who helped a family tear down wallpaper and carry lots and lots and lots of big, heavy boxes – 26 of them holding quilting stash - onto a moving van. The quilter in this family felt it would be very nice to make a quilt for this young man out of the very materials he had helped load. So she found a hounds-tooth design and dug out pieces in colors he favored and sewed and sewed until she had a great (and somewhat Star-Trekkie)  “Thank You!!” to mail back to him. Thank you, Patrick, for all the help you gave us, from the Caulkins Family. Every bit of this quilt is part of the load you helped us move.

So goes the label for Patrick's Hounds' Blues.  (Guess I'm into storybook labels right now! I think I'll let that take me where it will while it lasts.)

This quilt was not on my UFO list. But I did hold myself to the rule of everything having to come from stash.  

Which is how it got to be so darned cool!

You see, successful houndstooths usually come from sticking to just two fabrics that are solids or read as nearly-solids. Well, I had that glorious 1/2-bolt of Kona Snow in my stash, but I couldn't find a single yardage of a good blue.  So I grabbed three that played well together and then sat down with a notepad and EQ to figure out how I could make the yardages work in the pattern.

Hmm. . .  Looking at the color layout, will it look good or will it lose cohesiveness?  Well - nothing gained unless I go for it!

So I went for it, even pressing my seams open like the younger crowd prefers. Yeah, it makes it lie nice and flat. But it severely limited me later. Won't spend time doing that again unless it's absolutely necessary.

And the forced fabric blend worked!  Those three blues together really make the design sing. When you see it in reality, it sparkles with a lot of life.

Had to splice some Hobbs Heirloom pieces to get big enough batting for this 60" x 60" beauty. Then, the biggest laugh was that rooting around for a good backing, I found a nice, big yardage of another great blue that would have easily accommodated the needs of the design. Heh! As good as the flimsy turned out, it was quite serendipitous that this piece was hidden from me at first.  :D

I had to compromise on the quilting I wanted to do because those open seams wouldn't let any ditchwork happen. 

1. It can't be secure to quilt on stitch junctions, particularly if the needle pierces the thread. 
2. It just sinks in and disappears.
3. There's the whole bearding-in-the-future issue.

But I do love how the wavy walking-foot lines worked out. These are 4" squares, and I simply waved down one seam, waved down another, and then eyeballed wavy lines to divide the rows into thirds. Perfect.  :)

And several of us laugh because that spacey blue in the mix evokes images that tickle the funny bones of us Trekkie nerds.

Can you see the ships?  LOL!!

~*~*~*~*~

TGIFF * Link A Finish Friday at Richard's * Whoop! Whoop! * It's A Saturday Sharing Day