I've had my August OMG finished for a week now, but have had a lot of trouble getting true-to-life photographs. I'm giving up and posting anyway.  :) 

In August 2017, my daughter gave me a wonderful jelly roll from the Maywood "Woollies Flannel" collection, and that November I sewed it up jelly race style, randomly inserting parallelograms of the gold Silk Radience I'd bought for its backing.

This April, I quilted it up using the pantograph, "Autumn Oaks" from Willow Leaf Studio. I usually do custom quilting on my own quilts, but once in a while they are better suited for all-over designs. This fall theme gave the quilt a gorgeous organic feeling that really elevated the jelly race "blah" feeling to a scrumptious quilt finish.

I used washable silk batting! I wondered if the thickness of the wool flannel would take away the charm of the silk batting's hand, but it's a very nice combination, particularly with the silk backing. (Although, the silk on silk *did* want to slip around during the quilting, so you have to be aware of that tendency while working.)

This is how shiny the silk actually looks.  :)

So I wondered about doing a puffed binding. I couldn't find anything online like what I saw in my mind's eye, so I experimented on a mug rug.

Still need to finish this up. . .

I'm putting together a tutorial, but all I did, really, was cut the silk radiance binding strips slightly larger than normal, so that I had an extra 1/4 inch of slack in the applied binding once it was stitched down on the back. After that, I spent TV time cinching the poofs down one by one all the way around. I found that 7/8  inch was a great spacing for this, and used 50wt Aurifil thread (single strand, double stitched and knotted on the back before and after each puff's cinch). 

The result is exactly what I'd pictured, and so very perfect on this quilt.  Next is to see how well it holds up over the years, but it feels very stable. Silk Radiance has a slightly stiff, but very flowy, hand when you're working with it this way, so it stands up nicely in the puffs. Regular quilting cottons (or, say, dupioni silk) would just fold in on themselves without puffing much - you would need something inside, like tulle, to give the puffs body.

So, yes, I would do a puffed binding again on the right quilt.  :)

Note to self: Embroidery with a single strand of 100wt silk was not the easiest!

LINKING UP at

Sarah's Whoop Whoop Fridays

TGIFF

 Elm Street Quilts for the August Finish Report 

My One Monthly Goal for August is to finish the puff stitches for the silk binding on this very cool autumn lap quilt, and do a label for it. 

The Rest of the Story:

The August UFO drawn by APQ is #10. 

My piecing #10 is my Sue Garman "And to All a Good Night" project.  

Great timing! I'm close to being finished with the top applique panel. 

I've pulled fabrics from my stash for the scrappy piecing of the main field in the quilt. I'm king-sizing the pattern to fit our bed. Hopefully it'll emerge the way my mind's eye sees it. Our room is blue and we put up a snow-flocked tree with blue accents in the bow window, so I wanted to incorporate blues and grays with a Christmas feel, but keep the green and red stars.

My longarming #10 is my Allietare from the Bonnie Hunter mystery of winter 2015-16. I finished the flimsy in a timely manner, but it's sat forever in my longarming closet. 

I do have to finish a lot of remaining work on this GINORMOUS king-sized Dinner Plate Dahlia (also for our bed) before I load Allietare. . . which gives me time to scare up a backing for that cheddar and turquoise beauty!

Today's BOMs Away is on the previous post at BOMs Away Monday - Neptune's Gift and More Birds

LINKING UP at Elm Street Quilts for the August OMG goal

 Here is my July OMG, all finished up.  :) 

"Chubby Chicks" is 60 x 60 inches, and is a Black Mountain Needleworks pattern. This is blanket-stitched fused applique.

This was a kit that I bought who-knows-when - it was in my conglomeration of NETYs (Not Even Touched Yet) that I organized after we moved here summer of 2012. In June 2013, I pulled it out to prewash its fabrics, and our oldest daughter and I got the chick bodies fused down. 

In May this year, EIGHT YEARS LATER, I stitched the bodies, added and stitched the beaks, and stitched in the feet. Now it is a super cute flimsy, hanging in my longarm closet. 

Not sure when its turn will come up, but the binding is made and tidily tucked into my drawer for those. 

I'll be linking this to the July reporting party at the end of the month:

One Monthly Goal: July

Woohoo!!!  You guys!  My "Sew Spooky" is FINALLY a finished quilt hanging on the wall!  It was my February OMG, and is my first full finish of the year, my first UFO completely shot down.  (Flimsy finishes are like "sightings" in my mind, and I've had a great run of 4 or 5 so far this year, but full finishes are the best score, of course!)

This is 55.5 x 66.5 inches after quilting and a wash. It was a 58 x 70 inch flimsy, and has dense quilting throughout. I always prewash fabrics and presoak batting, so if you don't do that, expect a lot more shrinkage. Batting is a single layer of Hobbs 80/20 Heirloom. It is soooo soft after the washing, yet the quilting still has nice dimension and looks great hanging. Dozens of threads were used on this, including several colors each of Microquilter, SoFine, Glide 40 and 60 weights, Aurifil 50 weight, Bottom Line, and Sulky Holoshimmer. I used pre-wound SuperBobs in silver, black, and orange, whichever was closest to the color being done on top. Designed by Arlene Stamper and Melissa Harris.

Started as a BOM in October 2014, and sewn up relatively quickly, this was partially quilted on my domestic in 2016, but then set aside when I decided to get a longarm. I wanted to do a lot of fancy quilting on it, so it was shelved to await a time when I felt comfortable with the new set-up. And then it waited and waited.

In 2019 I squared up the backing's overflows and started working it on the longarm. I'm not sure why it got pulled off after only doing the top bat blocks. I do remember that I wasn't particularly happy with how my quilting design was turning out, and it was a time-consuming process that I was not about to pick out. It was something to do with wishing I'd used a slightly larger scale with the "wallpapering."

It got re-loaded in early September, but family deaths followed by getting a bad Covid case derailed all my quilting until mid-January. I did not have the heart to pull this off the frame yet again, so I called it my Pre#7 in terms of the APQ UFO Challenge that I settled into for 2021.

When I started back at my longarm on Jan 11, I could only do 15 minutes per day. This week I have been able to do three 90 minute sessions per day! So I'm slowly rebuilding stamina.

The first thing I tackled on this quilt was finishing up those bats. That took F O R E V E R, given my capabilities at the time. And once I finished, I was magically much, MUCH happier with the effect of the scale. I actually love them now!

Not knowing how-the-heck to quilt anything else, I had to jump mental hurdles for every element as I moved along. The candy corns were simple, as I wanted them to have good dimension, so they just kept the ditchwork and single line across the middle of the sections. For their background, I went with a curly-cue feather approach that was inspired by the print on their background fabric.

Next I tackled that bright orange sashing. I thought with the candy corn being a thing, this provided a good place for me to practice ribbon candy, which I'd never done before. I wanted to learn the double style, and my conclusion was that single-style is far more pretty in a 1-inch sashing. The double is pretty in wider sashing. In the end, though, the flatness of the double on this scale works better for this densely quilted quilt than the single would have.

After the sashing, I turned to the blocks and did the work on the buildings. The witch house in the center was the most fun, as it kinda has a witch's dress feel to it. So I accented the buckle idea on the upper floor and gave the main floors a Bo-Peep style skirt ruffles effect.

Paths got dimensional lines, but the grass eluded me forever about how to handle. I finally tried out a half-inch on-point grid for CC's, and those worked out perfectly for lawn areas.

The black web border had been done on my domestic years ago, with a simple webbing-style FMQ pattern.

Which left only those star corners. Some ditch work around the circles and stars, outline the owls, and then I tried out that Sulky Holoshimmer thread on my longarm for some shooting star lines and "magic" squiggles. Wasn't sure how that was going to behave!

After a few minutes of fiddling with tension, though, it worked just fine. I used the lateral spool feeder on top of my machine, skipping the entire back half of the tensioning path and lowering the number of threading hole in the front half's bars. I did use a slick Glide bobbin with it instead of the matte SuperBobs. I only had like 1 break in the thread, so I was happy. I even went back and put silver highlighting on the belt of the central block, the cloud outlines on the witch block, and the detailing on the Ghoul School's doors, and then pulled out some glittery variegated thread to try for some more "magic" swirls in the Jack-O'-Lantern house's doorway and a window. Worked great. I'll be playing more with those specialty threads in future!

None of the metallics show up at all in the photos. In real life they glisten so prettily. Gold around the ghosts to help their glittery white fabric stand out a little more from the background fabric, as well as around the little moon and witch's broom straw, and the star on the crow's pumpkin. Silver holoshimmer thread and glittery variegated was used as described above in the quilting.

This quilt has fun embellishments here and there - novelty buttons mainly, with some embroidered eyes for crows, spiders, and cat.

It even has its own free-floating mini quilt that's hand quilted! With a "friend" underneath!

And even though I knew from the beginning this would primarily be a wall quilt, I gave it a fun Halloween print for its backing.

. . . Along with an appliqued bat for its label.  :)

For a quilt that used up so much mental energy to figure out how to approach it for the quilting, it sure did turn out magnificently.

Linking up with:

February OMG finish party

Tish's UFO Busting party

My One Monthly Goal is to finish all the quilting on my Sew Spooky. 

It was loaded onto my frame in late September, but didn't get touched while we visited Scott's mom, and then attended her funeral. Which we got Covid from.  :( 

Since I hadn't stepped foot in my longarm room from before we were exposed (which remains closed to keep kitties out), I left it shut up to keep it virus free in there. It took many weeks for me to have enough energy to even attempt to work at the longarm, so that door stayed "sealed" until January 4th. 

Since then, I've managed to push my physical capability from 30 minutes in a day to two 40 minute sessions in a day. I hope to get up to 1 hour in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon by the end of this week. 

Being a quilt that I wanted to practice a lot of tiny fill work on, its time on the frame has really S T R E T C H E D out over the weeks!

This is the month, though! This baby's going to get finished finally.  

And because that's only a fraction of the time I have available, here is "The Rest of the Story" for February --

Mon-Fri Priority Time: 

Longarm: Sew Spooky > when that finishes, load up UFOq #2 King Size Dahlia

Domestic: FMQ on Moose Lake for Scott > then move to UFOp #2 Down the Rabbit Hole, which needs the rest of the applique on the rabbit borders and the outer diamond piecework border.  [Plus slip in 10 min per day on the secret birds.] [Leader-Ender = Feathered Goose units 4]

Evening hand stitching: 

Finish the first bathroom curtain, and how far will I get on And to All a Good Night? It's possible that might be finished this month; if so, pull out the next Affairs of the Heart block.

Saturday Free-Play: 

Whatever UFO catches my eye (usually ends up being that weekend's BOM)

Weekend BOM times: 

[Temperature dots] and rotate Harmony, Forever My Valentine, and Surfer's Point

That is not as much tasking as it looks to be. With an empty nest house, I have several hours every day that I can devote to quilting things. I spend more time at my domestic machine these days since I have limited physical capability at the longarm. I do completely different work on the weekends from what I do Mon-Fri. I am *not* one of those people who can work on only one project all the time every day for weeks on end until it is finished. That is the fastest way to kill my mojo altogether, and then nothing happens.

Also note that other than my OMG, my list acts not as a whipping post demanding multiple finishes, but more like a bowling lane's bumper rails that keep me focused while I work along. I'm happy with whatever point each of those projects gets to by month's end. This part of my planning is about the journey, not the finishes (although the finishes crop up regularly). 

*If you were looking for the BOMs Away link-up, it is on the last post: BOMs Away Monday 

Linking this post up to OMG February