Started on a new mystery/BOM - and plans ahead

There are so many BOM's out there in cyberspace; some you have to pay for, and some are free. When an interesting one pops up, I have a problem saying no to it. The result is that so far this year I have joined 2014 Aurifil BOM,  and another one by Pat Sloan: Globetrotting.

This is the first block, called Washington DC. You can read more about the BOM here .

In addition I have also joined a challenge to complete at least 5 quilting UFOs before May 1st. I have finished one (a pillow) already, and UFO number 2 will be on its way to the quilter by the end of the month. UFO #3 is a twin size quilt (from 2012) where I just have to finish the quilting and sew the scrappy binding on. UFO #4 is the 2012 Aurifil BOM where the top is done. UFO #5 is the 2013 Aurifil BOM where I have to assemble the blocks; come up with a nice layout, and just do it! As you can see, I have chosen to work with quite big projects!

Several of the quilters in my group will have a virtual sew along during the weekend to get some progress on these projects.

In addition to this, I will try to make a couple of charity quilts in between. And, also, there will probably pop up several tempting projects along the way. I will just have to learn to say no, because I can't do everything!

 

Celtic Solstice Top 100% Completed

Just a few minutes ago I sewed the last border on my Celtic Solstice quilt top, and it is now officially completed!

As compared to Bonnie's original version measuring 75" square, I added a checkerboard of blue and neutral four patches on top and bottom to lengthen the quilt, after a tip from a fellow blogger.. In addition I made the outer green border wider, and as per now my quilt top measures 89.5"x83.5". This will make it fit my queen size bed.

Here is a closer look of the checkerboard. I am very happy about the colors I decided for this extension. They help balance the busy top against the sort of monochrome (actually two-colored) border.

As always, indoor pictures are never the best. But, with cold winter weather outside, including a freezing wind, this is all I can offer today.

Now I have to start piecing the back of the quilt. I have the fabric ready, and I will add some leftover blocks from the front, also. I think it will be an interesting and colorful backside!

EDIT:

Here is a little peak of the pieced back. I found room for some leftover checkerboard, and I also had to display more of my elephants! There is a lot of this yellow/white elephant fabric on the front, but due to the size of these blocks the elephants didn't get a prominent display. That is all taken care of now!

I have to hurry finishing the back so I can send the quilt off to Merete for quilting. She did such a perfect job with my Easy Street one year ago.

Linked up to Bonnie's Celtic Solstice Mystery link up finale .
 

Celtic Solstice - assembled

Here is my Celtic Solstice top completed, just missing the border outside the pieced border. This is how far I managed to get before I have to pack up my top and head for home across the Atlantic.

I have decided to lengthen the quilt by adding a row of four-patches on top and bottom, and add a wider green border all around the quilt. This will make it fit a queen-size bed (almost). I will have to decide on the colors of the four-patches on the plane back home.

 

If you remember a post of mine earlier in the process of this quilt, you may recognize the posh cat lady in the picture above. She has got a central position in the quilt.

 

  

When Bonnie made the final reveal on New Year's Day, I was surprised that the orange and blue blocks were to be the outer pieced border. Most of the orange fabric are my last Halloween remnants! It works out OK, though!

 



 

Corn fabric, witches, and black cats are lining up around the quilt in a never ending queue. They are well behaved, though.

To sum up; all the fabric used in this quilt, except for the inner neutral border and the soon to become green outside border, are from my own stash. It should have reduced the fabric on my shelves, but, fabric sales here were to tempting, and I am bringing home more than I used in this quilt. Good deals are good deals, and you don't walk away from them if you are a quiltoholic! Let's see if I manage to put them all in my suitcase...

 

Bonnie's site  shows links to a great deal of the more or less finished Celtic Solstice quilts, take a look at the gorgeous art work!



 

Celtic Solstice - blocks completed

 

Last night, while my family was watching a movie, I finished the blocks for the center of my quilt. Here they are all laid out on the floor of the study/sewing room. 

 

Today the assembly job will start. It is a bright and sunny day here in the southwestern US, but the temperature is freezing. It was approx. -14 degrees C (or 10 deg F) this morning when I woke up. Luckily there is no wind, otherwise it would be bitterly/brutally cold as they say on the weather forecast on TV. We have no snow, though.

A perfect time to be inside sewing blocks together. A more detailed picture is shown below.

Check out other linkies here .

 

Celtic Solstice Part 5

All the 100 units for Part 5 are now completed, and I have several days to work on other projects. I had great fun working with this clue, and I don't think I have one unit the same as any other.

Here are a few selected units. I am especially pleased wth the blue lady cat from London in the upper left corner, my yellow shirt fabric with white elephants, the different orange Halloween fabric, and last but not least, my corn fabric. I have such a variety of different fabrics in these blocks, and I think they are lovely!

 

All my 100 units nicely stacked up to show the variety of fabrics. I am looking forward to the next step, and hoping that I will be able to finish most of the steps before I have to take the fabric with me and head for home after the vacation is over.

I have wondered how the layout will be in the end, we definitely need more neutrals before it's done. I have played a little around with the blocks from the 5 different steps, and I know that the end result will not be like this, but aren't these good looking assemblies?

The progress of the other participants can be seen on Bonnie's site.

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EDIT: A little quilt math, numbers are for the small quilt of 75"x75":

Pieces in the quilt blocks this far: 2264
Number of 3 1/2" x 3 1/2" blocks left to make: 112

Let's see how Bonnie is going to solve this!

 

Celtic Solstice Part 4 and Merry Christmas!

Late last night I finished Step 4 in the Celtic Solstice Mystery, and now I'm caught up with this project and have a few days to relax and enjoy Christmas before the next step is published on Friday.



All the 120 four-patches came together fast and easy with Bonnie's instructions, and they were all spinning the same way.

I really enjoy that I am able to use only fabric from my stash, and finally use the rest of my orange Halloween fabric! As for the previous step, there were 8 different fabrics in each pinwheel.

 

Here are a fourth of the four-patches laid out on display. Bad indoor lighting does not give full credit to the colors, but as you can see I have chosen a warm palette.

In this picture you can clearly see my Halloween fabrics, there is even corn and witches in my quilt!

On Bonnie's  site you can see the progress of the other participants.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas!

 

Celtic Solstice Part 3, and Ice Storms

Saturday night I finished Part 3 with the 25 pinwheels and the 100 single units. The pinwheels are shown under.

It was kind of late when I finished, and I didn't take a picture of the single units. This step was a fun one to do, because I love making pinwheels!

What about Ice Storms? Yes, my family and I are having Christmas vacation in the Southwestern US, and here ice storms occur from time to time during the winter. Friday afternoon we had a place to go, and when we were returning home and had 100 miles to drive, it started raining, with freezing temperatures. This is a weather phenomenon I have never experienced before.

We were driving home, with DH as the safe driver. The conditions were kind of treacherous with the frozen rain glazing the car, and not to mention the windshield wipers! The fortunate thing, though, was that the rain didn't freeze on the ground. The reason for that was probably that we had had very high temperatures for the season the day before, and the ground wasn't cold enough to freeze, yet. Anyway, DH drove slowly, as most of the other cars did.

We managed to get home safely without any accidents, and in the garage afterwards we could see the amount of ice that had accumulated on the car. DS1 took a lot of pictures, both of the car and the surrounding trees the day after. I will show some of them in a later post.

Here is the tree outside our door, completely glazed! It is still like this, today, since the temperature has not increased. Last night DH and I took a walk in the neighborhood and heard a lot of cracking noises and saw limbs breaking and falling off the trees. We kept our distance and didn't walk under any of them, just to be safe.

Let's hope there will not be any wind before the temperatures start rising and the ice melts off, because we don't want more damage to be done to the trees than what has already happened. Anyway, the icicles and glaze have created fantastic Christmas decorations to the surrounding area!

Link to Bonnie's Mystery Monday Link Up #4 is HERE .

 

Celtic Solstice Part 2

 

All my 100  Chevron units for the mystery are finally done. Looking good.

 

Have started cutting half square triangles for part 3 and hope to get a good way into sewing pinwheels later today.

 

The progress of the other participants can be found HERE .

 

Celtic Solstice gone traveling

Here are Step #1, and #2 (almost completed), all packed up in ziploc bags and ready to go on Christmas vacation with me. Of course, additional fabrics will also come along. I long to continue working on finishing the second clue and start the pinwheels on clue #3; my other sewing machine is waiting for me when we arrive.

All the fabric I am using for Celtic Solstice is from my stash, and it is amazing to see how big my stash has grown since I started quilting 2 years ago! There are probably enough fabric for 10+ quilts there...

 

Celtic Solstice Part #1

Yesterday I finally managed to start this mystery. I am working on step 1, making blocks with the Tri Recs Ruler. As you may see, a lot of the orange is remnants from Halloween...

Since I made Easy Street in king size last year, I have decided to stick with the 'small' version this year, approx 75" x 75".

This is going to be fun!

See the progress of the other participants here.

 

BIMB - assembled rows

Yesterday I sewed all my thirteen rows in Bee In My Bonnet Row Along together, so now I have a bright and cheerful quilt top here. Only the pieced border is missing, and that will be revealed in a week or so.


The top, this far, is 50.5" wide, and approx. 66" long. I really look forward seeing the borders Lori Holt wants us to make, I guess they will be very colorful!

I have used fabric from my stash for this quilt, a lot of scraps, plus solid white of course. I will not even try to count all the different fabrics/colors in the quilt top, it is a lot!

A finish!

Finally I can show you pictures of my finished Easy Street! I got it back from Merete who did a fantastic job on the quilting, but then I got the flu and did not have any energy to do the binding. When the bugs finally decided to leave, I did the binding in two days. For a 100" x 100" (~2.5 m x 2.5 m) that's a lot of binding; more than 10 m to be sewn by hand on the back. No wonder that my hands were hurting when I finished!


Here the quilt is in all its glory on my floor. As you can see I don't have quite a big enough floor for such an enormous quilt!


I used a "tropical" print for the backing which I found on sale at Hancocks Fabrics. The apple-green color of the leaves were just perfect to complete the quilt! But, and there is always a but, more than 8 yards of fabric was not enough for the backing of this huge quilt...


...so I added another piece in the center, this time brown flowers on yellow. At least the flowers have the same color as the background of the green leaves.


The last picture shows a close-up of the binding and the great quilting performed by Merete. I am very pleased with the result, and this is a quilt that will be cherished for many years to come!

Easy Street quilt top 100% finished!

Here the top is flying in the wind with DH holding it tight. I am very pleased with the final result, the borders are on and the top definitely looks more complete now.

On the ground you can really see how big it is; approximately 100" square. The inner border is 1" finished, and the outer is 5".

It fits my bed perfectly!

Here is a detail picture of the borders. The colors look a bit dull indoors.

This is a huge quilt, and I don't think I will be able to quilt it myself. I will take the quilt top home with me, prepare the backing and take it further on from there.
At least one part of my UFO list is completed!

Have a nice day!

Easy Street borders, plus UFO list

Finally I have bought the border fabrics for Easy Street. The purple and turquoise were washed and dried yesterday together with color cather sheets, thank goodness; the sheets were dark with excess color.

The purple will be the narrow inner border. I also bought the backing fabric on sale, and I will show you that later when I have come further on with the process.

A lot of other bloggers have come up with lists of UFO projects to finish in 2013. Even though I haven't been quilting for a very long time, after rummaging through my UFO/WISP list I have quite a long list. Several of the projects are BOMs or BOM-like.

Here is the list of big projects that I will complete before starting anything new:

UFOs/WISP

EASY STREET - needs borders, backing and quilting
2012 AURIFIL DESIGNER OF THE MONTH - working on the last stitchery, needs sashing, backing and quilting
JACKIE'S BLOGGERS BOM - quilt top finished, needs backing and quilting
LORI HOLT'S ROW ALONG - still a few weeks/months to go

After having committed myself to completing these projects, I still have a few other quilts I will do as soon as possible. Among them is a twin sized quilt for DS2.

Progress will be shown on the blog!

Easy Street quilt top finished!

All the 2377 small pieces, if I did my math correct, are sewn together. The quilt top is finished and all that is missing is the inner and outer border. Here it is on top of my bed.

This picture gives more credit to the colors. Picture taking late in the afternoon indoors is never the best idea when it comes to lighting.

All in all, piecing Easy Street was a great experience! This was my first mystery quilt, and the biggest quilt I have made, ever! After starting quilting just over a year ago, I now feel confident in starting larger and more complex projects. Thanks to Bonnie for making this mystery and posting all the excellent clues and instructions for the piecing!

The hunt for border fabrics will begin!

Here is the link to the progress of the other participants in this mystery.