Jungle Magnolia Month 3 Finished

 Hi all -

We've continued to see a lot of rain here. Boy, is it green! And I have a lot of beautiful wild flowers in the yard! The weather is just now starting to move into our normal June cycle of dry, clear mornings with some thread of rain and thunderstorms in the afternoons. I love that mix!

I'm excited that I'm staying up-to-date on my Jungle Magnolia BOM (Block of the Month) designed by Judy Niemeyer. I don't usually keep up with things like this, so I'm pretty happy with myself right now. To finish it, this week I finished putting together the D units:

Jungle Magnolia - D1 Units

Jungle Magnolia - D2 Units

Then I had to attach the D units to the other finished units:

Jungle Magnolia

You can really see the quilt coming together! We had our monthly BOM small group meeting today so I finished the prep work for next month's units and started on the prep work for the following month. Since I have the entire pattern, I can do the prep work (which consists of cutting apart all of the paper foundations and the unit templates, which come on large sheets of newsprint) early so I can get right to piecing when the fabric arrives each month. There's a lot of prep work for Judy Niemeyer patterns!

I found it a little confusing starting up again on Jungle Magnolia after the time off between fabric packets, so I decided to go ahead and buy the fabric for my Amazon Star quilt also designed by Judy Niemeyer and get started on that one.  I started by purchasing the fabric:

Amazon Star - Purchased Fabric

The pattern calls for 17 different fabrics. Since this isn't a perfect world (why not???), the store didn't have colors that matched exactly what I was looking for. Luckily, they had a table where I could set the bolts out as I tried to figure out which fabrics would work for each color. I then had to load those in the shopping cart carefully to keep the order intact and then had to make the clerk cut the fabric in order and keep the stacks in order. I like to prewash my fabrics, so I bought a little extra of each one to account for shrinkage. When I got home, I took the fabrics out of the bag in order and wrote the fabric number in the corner on each piece with a Sharpie. I could then wash the fabrics without having to worry about the order. I could also have clipped a little square from each fabric and pasted them to the sheet in the pattern that is designed for this, but some of these fabrics are pretty similar so using the Sharpie ensured that no mistakes were made. When the fabrics came out of the dryer, I carefully folded each piece and put a numbered clip on each so I could keep everything organized.

Amazon Star - Washed and Folded Fabrics

Amazon Star - Numbered Clips

I bought these clips years ago and they really are useful. I can write whatever on the tabs with a wet erase marker and then wipe them clean with a wet rag when I'm done. Now, as with Jungle Magnolia, it was time to prepare the pattern pieces. Did I mention there's a lot of prep work in a Judy Niemeyer pattern?? Luckily, this pattern is a lot less complicated than the Jungle Magnolia pattern! I was able to get the prep work done in just a couple of hours. First, I had to cut out the paper foundations and put them in the designated bags to keep thing organized:

Amazon Star - Foundation Papers

Then I had to cut out the cutting templates. After cutting out the templates, I clipped them to the appropriate fabric so I can easily find them when I need them.

Amazon Star - Cutting Templates with Associated Fabric

The pattern then has you do all of the fabric cutting at once, but I'm going to just cut the fabrics needed for each part as I do the piecing. I'm hoping this will allow me to audition the fabrics for each unit along the way to hopefully catch any colors that aren't working. I was able to piece the units for the first part of the quilt:

Amazon Star - First Units

These are the center units for the quilt. They are just laying next to each other as they aren't sewn together until later. I'm liking the colors so far!

I've also continue working on my Flying Beauties cross-stitch kit. You can now tell that I'm working on the first butterfly:

Flying Beauties

I love watching the picture come to life when doing cross-stitch! 

I also did some work on my Flower Pincushion designed by Sue Spargo:

Flower Pincushion

I'm now done with the embroidery. The next step is to applique a length of ribbon to the bottom piece and then I can put everything together. Then, of course, it'll be time to start a new project (or 2 or 3....)!

Finally, I started another crochet blanket. This one is the Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse.

Kalme Throw

Kalme Throw - Stitch Pattern Close-Up

This is an even simpler blanket than my last one. It is just the same stitch repeated for 190 rows.! There's no border on this one so I can easily add extra rows if I have extra yarn and want a longer blanket.

Nancy