Moving It Forward Monday: QOV Edition

This morning I was viewing the latest posts in my Bloglovin' feed.  Katy who blogs at Katie Quilts  was linking up to pattern designer Em Baily's "Moving It Forward Monday" link up at her blog Em's Scrapbag.  Since I've actually managed to move a few projects forward last week, I decided to link up as well.

Here's what's up on the wall as of this morning:

The quilt top in the center is "Combat Gratitudes"  my first (finally!!) Quilts Of Valor project.  This one is in non-traditional colored fabrics for a QOV (that is, not Red, White and Blue).  It started with this Focus Fabric:

Then this was the stash collected to go with it (I call it the "Camouflage Color Scheme"):

This great quilt design by Vickie Welsh of Field Trips in Fiber  is only made with four main blocks all finishing at 8". 

I started off by testing if the fabrics would work with the design it by making only a few blocks first:

I thought it looked good so continued with it and now all the blocks have been finished, sewn into rows and the rows sewn together.  Next step is to work out the borders.  In Vickie's instructions, the center as I have it now can be finished for use as a veteran's wheelchair lap quilt but she also provides instructions for adding borders to bring it to the size desired for QOV donations.  I feel that since the light gray  units on the border edge have a little more contrast than the ones in her original border design, I want to "round out" those units somehow so I'll be working on that and making the border wider overall this week.

I used "Combat Gratitudes" as the leader/ender for the "Across County Lines" top I worked on during July and August (and that finished top can be seen here).  Once that top was finished and this one became the primary project, I decided to  start on my second QOV and use that as the  leader/ender while finishing "Gratitudes".  So on the left side of the wall are my "Cosmic Valor" blocks, this time in the time honored RWB color scheme.

You can find the pattern for these cool looking (and not as difficult as they look) blocks in Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting May/June 2016, patterned as "Patriotic Cosmic Stars".

As a self proclaimed "Gadget Fanatic", I was also able to have a lot of fun with  tools that helped get both of these projects cut out and sewn in a reasonable amount of time.  If you like gadgets too, check out this post on what I used.

I hope to keep up all the good forward momentum!  Happy stitching!!