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

Flimsy Alert~! Finished my Allietare top!

I'm so excited to have my mystery quilt top finished! Here's my "Allietare"!

I really love how the different fabrics for each color make it sparkle!

I was committed to using my stash and scrap collection. I had hardly anything at all left in the neutrals category, but I did have tons of golds/mustards, so I substituted those into the neutrals spot. That left left a need for something in the golds spot. I had liked the look of the teal in the original button for the mystery, so I decided to go with that. To counter the darker "neutral" color, I lightened the gray constant fabric to a silver. It's actually a completely metallic silver, too, which is neat. This color scheme meant I only needed a few fat quarters of blacks and teals.

It's always a gamble, though, whether your color changes will work in a mystery!  I'm glad these did. As a couple of folks noted, it looks more Spanish this way than Italian, but that's just fine! 

This colorway almost didn't get to emerge. When I had all my blocks made and laid them out - well . . . the effect wasn't floating my boat. I think my brain had developed a certain expectation that was very different from what emerged. 

So I let it marinate overnight after sharing it on Facebook. The little bit of time away, combined with my 18yo liking it a lot, as well as plenty of online folks, changed my perspective, and I decided not to break it into two separate quilts made from the A and the B blocks. I noticed that it felt a little smooshed and busy to my mind's eye with the aqua popping out so prominently amongst other strong colors, and wondered if all it needed was some floating/framing of more golds/mustards to give it the space it needed to breathe.

And wow! Didn't that just do the very trick?!  Laying out my black fabric for the border area and trying reds and aquas in the setting triangle spaces definitely confirmed that this color combo wanted breathing space. I had barely enough left of my golds to pull it off. I also had just enough of my teals left to give the edge a kiss of the aqua effect. I'll buy some more teal yardage for the binding, but it will be quite a while before this can get quilted. I sure wish I could see it completely finished NOW.  :D  

That outer diamond border is a work-up I developed using a bunch of the bonus HSTs I harvested when I made the flying-geese-type units. Whenever I do those in a non-multiples method, I always stitch a double seam so that when I cut the corner off, I get an extra HST to add to my shoebox of those. One day I'll get to play with them, and that's going to be a lot of fun to see what emerges!

In the meantime, I trimmed those babies down so that the finished size is TINY - a mere 1/2 inch! They are tiny, but as long as you trim them with excruciating preciseness, it's not hard to get them to sew up very nicely without losing your points. 

It's also nice if, when you add your setting triangles to each 4-patch, you pay attention and attach them the right way. I put every single one on the 220 units THE WRONG WAY AROUND. 

It took me 4 hours to take them all off without warping my units. Oh, well - it gave me some unplanned movie time. heh!! After that setback, putting together the skinny bricks to make the outer aqua border was a piece of cake! And fortunately my math was all on spot, so everything lies nice and flat despite the shift from on-point bias settings to the straight-grain settings on the gold floater boarder and the aqua outside border. By the way, I did baste all around the outside to protect the many seams along the edge from pulling apart at the edge. 

I really enjoyed this mystery, and look forward to next year's! Thank you, Bonnie! 

You really should see the great variety of finishes that are showing up. Bonnie has a linky where they are being shared - just click on this button:  

Also linking up at Whoop! Whoop!

I'll just leave you with this out-take from the photo op in our back yard. Gotta love a timely snowstorm for quilt pictures!

BOMs Away - a mess of a day

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.

Nope. I didn't get my Allietare finished. When I was working on the diamond borders, I found that I'd sewn all 220 triangles on THE WRONG WAY AROUND. (See how they're sideways instead of having the blue on the edge of the border when they're lined up?)

So Friday's sewing time was spent undoing all of those (four hours), and then Saturday I got most of them re-sewn and got one side mostly sewn together so I could make sure I was going to have enough units. 

Today I finished fixing all the triangle additions and made the few extra units that will be needed. That's all I accomplished, though. I had to undo and redo and undo and redo things right and left. Not sure what my problem was, but it was physical as much as mental. I finally just gave up and went back upstairs to read in bed for a couple of hours. On the way, though, the cats asked for their lunch, and I couldn't even do that right!!!  heh!  You should have seen the freakzoid look they gave me when I spilled everything all over the place. I just wanted to cry, so I told them to get over it and enjoy their buffet service. Yes, I really did just leave it all there for them to clean up for me!  Hope your day went more smoothly.  :D

Oh!!  But speaking of cats - we got a new family member! Well, sorta. Heather needed an apartment companion, so when she was down here the other day, I went to the rescue site to check out the current cats while she was at her preceptor's office. This fella here was THE SWEETEST CUDDLE PAL right off the bat with a most excellent purr motor! No behavioral problems - he was dumped on the street by people who were moving where they couldn't have a pet.

That snuggly personality is worth oodles of gold, and yet he was practically free because of his adulthood. 

So I scooped Lupin up and adopted him pronto after Heather saw the pics that I texted and said she'd trust my personality judgement.

And it was love at first sight on both sides when Heather got back to my place. She was thrilled at her new-found friend and happily took him back up to her place, where he has settled in very contentedly, despite the new, super-confusing experience of having claw shields glued on. I was right - he's a total teddy-bear of a cat, sleeping snuggled up under the covers with a human that he's happy to love whole-heartedly.

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Have you worked on any BOMs or similar projects lately? 

An InLinkz Link-up