BOMs Away - Star Crazy, DOD Americana, & a New Household Friend

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.

Hi! Today I worked on my Star Crazy BOM. I got the Month 3 blocks sewn, 

along with the extra HSTs for the border work later on.

I also did all the HSTs for Month 4, so maybe I'll get 2 months of blocks finished in August.

Then I put together the first of my fireworks blocks for the DOD Americana BOM. Yes . . . I did, indeed, let myself get sucked into another BOM. But we've been an active duty Air Force family for 26 years, and I haven't yet made an Americana quilt other than the Quilts of Valor that I've sent away, so don't you think it was appropriate that I cave in to this one?  ;D

By the way, this just barely started, so you can get in on it also, and she's also running a nice spring-time BOM as well. This is one of those set-ups where you get the emerging patterns for free each month if you show that you made the block in the month the pattern came out. Later on, you can buy the patterns.

And. . . just for giggles: Meet our new household friend. He seems to be named "Wally" now.

How can you not smile at that?  (Yes, the mouth was Sharpied onto the label.) Penney's was having a most excellent sale yesterday, and our old one smokes when you use it.

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So, did you get any work done on your BOMs?  Go ahead and share so we can keep each other motivated to keep them from stalling out.  :D

Finish Along - Quarter 3 Goal Post, getting back on track

It's that time - if you're participating, don't forget to make a Third Quarter "goal" sheet. The 2015 quarterly Finish-Along is hosted by Adrianne over at "On the Windy Side."

Quarter 2 was not productive at all for me in terms of finishes. In fact, I only had one little UFO finish on June 30th, which I never even recorded until now. That was the mini, "Twinkletoes" from my Sea Breeze collection of tops.

It's really hard to photograph the dimensionality of this one. The octopus has some great trapunto behind him:

Our big accomplishment was Devon and Kyle's wedding on June 14th. 

It was a perfect day, but ~WOWZA~ what a ride getting there! I am not a good party planner to begin with, and this at-home garden wedding was complicated by the fact that we could not actually count on the date until within 2 weeks of the event! The groom was at Basic Training for the Marine Corps. This is 13 weeks long, and is notorious for recruits getting bumped back to later finish dates because of anything from pneumonia to sprained ankles, severe pink eye, failed tests or rifle qualification, or even broken bones. So you can't bank on their graduation date until about 12 days before it will actually happen! They then have 10 days off before they report back for the rest of their training sequence before they go to their assigned job. It behooves couples to get married during that break instead of after Combat Training, because they want to get their first fleet assignment (which comes during combat training) as a married Marine, not a single Marine. Who wants that first 3-year assignment to be unaccompanied?? So, we dealt the best we could with the challenge of a possible date change. In the end, it all came off as planned, and even the anomalous weather we've had this spring/summer - weeks and weeks on end of hail every single day - defied that day's forecast to give us a perfect wedding afternoon/evening. 

Three weeks out from their Big Day, I'm almost back to my normal routines. Which includes planning my quilting tracks.  :)

1. Devon & Kyle: 

First in priority is finishing the wedding quilt and the Marine Corps quilt. I'm almost finished hand appliqueing the second half of the ribbons and birds on Devon & Kyle's double wedding ring quilt border. I may or may not get to report this as a complete finish by quarter's end, as the quilting will be highly detailed heirloom intensity, and I only have a tabletop machine.

(super wrinkled since it lives bundled on the back of my sofa for stitching times)

2. Semper Fi, Combass:

Kyle's Marine Corps quilt will definitely be finished by August 31st. :)  Just need to do the detail quilting in the red bands and some background fillers around the stars and in the center medallion. I took it with us to his graduation in San Diego, and was actually astonished that a partially-quilted project with some 500 safety pins in it inside my carry-on did not cue off a hands-on search through airport security. 

(Not spread flat because Navarre thinks this is his, and leaps onto it the second I lay it out anywhere. . . crazy cat!!)

3-7. Sea Breeze minis - These flimsies need finishing  **UFOs**

"Tweedle Dum"

(this shot is an ordering pic for the pattern - not my finished top)

"The Nerdles"

Maybe even "Tootsie and Rumples" or  "The Doodles"

or even "The Clampetts"

I would LOVE to get these two quilted for myself:

Modernology

and 

Rainbow Jane

And if I win the lottery (difficult, since I never buy tickets), I'll send these out for quilting:

Daisy, Daisy

Starry-Eyed Over Grand Illusion

Holiday Tidings

Or any of the other quilts named on my sidebar UFO list, particularly Kelly's projects.

Lots of big dreaming there in that line-up!!  Truthfully, I'll be happy with 2 finishes and thrilled with 3.

BOMs Away - Kelly's "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.

It has been a very, very long time since I've worked on Kelly's BOM quilt! Finally, though, I had a first-Sunday without wedding prep or activities, so I pulled it back out and did the quilting on the July-August-September row and its frames. It's all free motion on my table-top machine.

Fun crops:  The fireworks in July. Last night, as Devon and I were watching a show, a neighbor set off some beautiful (and highly illegal) fireworks that were perfectly framed in our picture window. You'd almost think we ordered them up special for our own enjoyment! 

Too bad I didn't have dark sparkly thread for this part.

I had fun putting in atypical wave reflection lines in the August sky. It works in the whole block's context. :)

And September's science-nerd schoolboy under the swing tree - Kelly's son, Brady, ought to get a kick out of him. (I'll be sending this quilt to him.)

If you've "known" me for a while, you already know that my first-Sunday BOM time is spent working on my cousin's UFOs (most of which were BOMs, anyway). She was like a sister to me, and died very young at 46 from a heart condition. So these are nice days for me to reminisce about Kelly as I work on her projects.

And then I came upstairs and saw how nicely the delphiniums have broken out over the last two days!

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How about you? Did you get any work done on your BOMs? I really like seeing how you're coming along - it inspires me to keep plugging away on mine.  :D