BOMs Away - Garden Friends, Grand Illusion, & a Visitor

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.

For Third-Sunday I pulled out "Garden Friends" and pieced the last two of the central blocks. I also fused all their applique pieces on:

 And I just pressed the last seam for the center of my Grand Illusion! Give me a couple of days to get all the borders on, and I'll share what I've done with that.

But I had a really great visitor for a good half of the day. This young fellow is the sweetest cat in the world! Clearly not a stray, we took him in while the kids canvassed the neighborhood to see where he was missing from. He's so sweet, though, I think every single person in the family would have been happy to adopt him if necessary. And as you can see, he fit right in with my quilting space, happily laying on various projects and lounging on the desk to watch me work. He even climbed onto my belly when I kicked my feet up to pick out a wayward seam and snoozed for a while. Too bad his human was joyful that he was found!

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Have you worked on any of your BOMs lately?

BOMs Away - Ruffled Roses & Grand Illusion

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.

Woohoo!!!!  

Today Navarre helped me lay out all the piano key swag blocks that I've made over the months for the final piecing of Ruffled Roses.

He was quite helpful!

And after a lot of time working up the floater borders and tiptoeing on eggshells with the iron (felt like it, anyway, working with those pressed-open piano keys!), 

the final round IS ON!

Now all that's left to do is hand stitching the last of the "berries" onto the floater border. And I've already got those made.  :D

Oh - and during the week I finished all the pieces for Grand Illusion. Here's the whole set of 2's:

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Have you worked on your BOMs lately?

Finish Report - "Laurel Burch Christmas"

So here's my last finish of 2014, finally all photographed and written up:

"A Laurel Burch Christmas"

Can you see the snow falling in that photo? Perfect.  :)

And I've got Devon's fiance trained already for quilt photo-opping! He doesn't mind helping out at all, and has a good time doing so.

I love Laurel Burch fabrics - they're so whimsical and vibrant. This was a kit I bought in the summer of 2011, and pieced the top in December 2012 (the pattern is a free download here). It's been in the flimsy closet since then, poor thing!

This was put together with a fine, very soft all-cotton pin-wale Kaufman corduroy backing and "washable" silk batting. It's a much lower loft than wool or poly give, even lower than 80/20 cotton/poly. It's a nice match with the soft corduroy, though. I pre-soaked it, then did my usual partial-dry in the dryer, air-dry to completion approach to get most of its shrinkage out of the way before using it. I'm not sure how I feel about this batting - it dries up quite lacy, and I'm not convinced I'd like it with thinner backing or more open quilting. The top started at 56 x 63", and after quilting, washing, and blocking it to get my marking chalks out when it was finished, it measures 54.5 x 61.75". (I did not use the dryer at all on this finished quilt because of the silk, and I'd say it didn't shrink much more at all since a fair bit of the dimensions difference would have come from the quilting alone.)

I had fun with the quilting. I do that on my domestic table-top machine (Sapphire 875Q), and I pin baste liberally. With my Lupus, I'm extra susceptible to cancers, so I'm not going expose myself to the carcinogenic chemicals in the spray basters (you get that exposure both when you apply it and all the time that you're quilting).

After stabilizing the quilt with ditch stitching along the borders and around each corner tree and ornament, I attacked the borders first. (I used Aurifil 50 wt threads for all but the metallics, and in the bobbins when I used those.)

Those were so easy - I used the walking foot to quilt the divisions between colors, then the spring-action free-motion foot to outline the characters. I didn't start and stop for each character, but came along the bottom line of the color strip and "stepped into" the field at the back of each character to work that one as I work along the strip. Oh - the itty birds in the narrow red strip were not individually outlined.

The word lines in the top and bottom borders got set apart with a metallic gold thread. It's much sparklier than it appears through the camera's eye:

"Magic & Merriment" - so perfectly describes Laurel Burch's work, don't you think?

The corner trees were next, where I used a specialty stitch to make metallic gold garlands, and then I tried my first McTavishing for those backgrounds so that the trees would puff out nicely: 

You can see that better from the back. Obviously I can use some practice with that motif, but I'm not unhappy with the turnout on this quilt.

Then I moved on to the ornaments, where I quilted each type differently from the others, using a silver hologram thread which turned out super sparkly (but the camera can't see that very well at all).

Black kitties got vertical spheroid lines in a snowflake stitch:

White kitties got horizontal lines alternating between a holly stitch and straight stitches:

The purple love-bird ornaments got vertical spheroid lines in lavender thread, with the hologram thread outlining the bird families:

Green deer ornaments got dark green quilting along the swooshy lines in the print, and then hologram outlining on each deer:

And the stags got black outlinings on the "star" of the show, with a hologram fancy-stitch ornament focal outline and straight-stitch horizontal sphere lines. There was one blue stag and a terrific White Stag:

I thought the gold hangers on the ornaments needed a wee touch of something, so I put in a fancy stitch using the same metallic gold thread that I had used when I outlined the word strips in the top and bottom borders.

Last, I tackled the main background, where I put in a free-motion doodle with holly leaves, berries, and ribbon curls:

The pattern called for jumbo rick-rack for the ornament strings, but I'd wanted something more sophisticated for this particular quilt. So I used some of that braided velvet gimping. LOVE it! It was absolutely perfect for this.

But you have to be meticulous while working, because one touch of the hot quilter's iron, and you have this little melted scar forever more. Not going to make me cry, though! It will practically never be found by any of us over the years as we use this.

For the binding, I used the faux-piping technic with a gold accent line inside the same red as the central background:

I love how this quilt turned out! The corduroy makes a really nice weight for winter evenings, and was a request of my husband's back when I pieced it. We didn't get to use it this year, since it wasn't blocked and dried until after Christmas day, and photo-opped after New Year's. But I'm so excited to lovingly stack it with the other two finished Christmas quilts to await full usage for the next holiday season!

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Linking up at:

Fabric Tuesday

Shannon's KISMIF

Can I get a Whoop! Whoop!

Link-a-Finish Friday

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