Happy New Year's Eve!

I hope everyone is having a great day, and getting ready to welcome the new year.  I have spent the day working on a mystery quilt, and figuring out how to use the second set of mystery quilt fabric I cut.  The end result is 2 tops almost done.  This first one is the mystery result, minus borders. At this size it is 50x70, which is the size I need for a donation quilt, so I'm stopping here.

The second one needs a little bit of tweaking to make the stacks look better (I like the top half better than the bottom), and some borders to make it the right size for a donation to Victoria's Quilts.

You can also see my leader/ender project still attached to the top, where I added the last border.  Oops.

I also finished quilting my house quilt yesterday.  I did some pretty dense quilting on this one, but I wanted to do justice to the houses. Each one has a slightly different pattern . And one of them has a cat sitting in the window.  I'll post better pictures once I get the binding done on this top.

2016 plans

At the end of this post are all my UFOs for this year. Lots of projects to choose from, for my next quilt.  But when I was looking at this list yesterday, none of them jumped out at me.  Bad sign - I'll be starting a new quilt if I don't get a plan in place soon.

Realistically, the 2 embroidery quilts are long term projects, and don't count as "quilting" until I get the embroidery done.  So they will just putter along at the bottom of the list.  Mexican star is also a handquilting project. I should add that to my handquilting bag, and get it done at the next couple of Poole Creek meetings.

Scrappy pineapple is going to remain my leader/ender project for the foreseeable future - it's nice in that I can do one seam and not lose track of where I am and what's next on it.  20 blocks done of 35 planned, so that should keep me in leaders/enders for most of the year.

Stonehenge needs to be finished - it's a submission for a magazine, so I'd better make that top of the list for now, although you won't be able to see it.  And finishing up Reflections and giant swoon are good projects to take along to quilting/sew days.

That should keep me busy for a bit.  I'll get the Kaffe Stripes going before I start anything new. I'd like to get the 2 applique quilts past the lick & stick stage ASAP, but that needs a certain mindset that I just don't have going on right now.  Maybe once my sewing room is cleaned up a bit.

I thought it might also be interesting to take a picture of my stash closet, as a reference so I can see the change over the year. Of course, I'm hoping to have that whole thing moved to a new location soon, but lets put it out there anyway.

Here's the mains stash, in my current closet - crammed full and needing some straightening desperately.

Then we have the storage under my cutting table. This mostly holds backings and flannel. I see now that I made a decent dent in this part of the stash this year. I new that 100 yards must have come from somewhere :)

And, my newly cleaned out closet. I relegated all my kids' stuff into my son's bedroom, including some shelving. Then moved the big white shelf from the main sewing room into the closet. Lots more room in the sewing area now.  This shelf has most of my scraps, fat quarters, and a bunch more flannel on it. Most of my "to be quilted" projects are hanging in here too now.



My project list, as of the end of December.

In progress:

1. Reflections of the North
2. Scrappy pineapple
3. Stonehenge
4. giant scrappy swoon
5. Row by row 2015
6. Edge of 17 shop hop quilt
7. Mexican star (really a UFO)
8. Kaffe stripes
9. Patchwork Year 
10. Gardener's Alphabet

Planned (fabric bought and/or collected)

1. recipe wall hanging
2. drunkards path variation
3. Christmas wreath
4. Christmas reindeer
5. two cityscapes/panels
6. ombre flying geese (leftovers from Spectrum) 
7. Jeans quilt

Mysteries

1. Bonnie Hunter
2. Merry Mayhem
3. About.com
4. Yahoo group (2 versions)
5. quiltbug.com

to be quilted

1. Building Blocks - 2012
2. Easy Street - Bonnie Hunter 2012 mystery
3. Turquoise Trails - 2013
4. Labyrinth - 2013
5. Starburst - 2013
6. Rainbow Explosion - 2014
7. Brights baby quilt - April 2014
8. Tell it to the Stars - Judy Laquidara 2014 mystery
9. Flowers in my Windows - 2014 New Year's Eve mystery
10. Block of the Week
11. turquoise &; brown rectangles
12. turquoise & brown diamonds 
13. turquoise & brown baby quilt
14. One Block Wonder #2
15. Border Creek Station mystery (started Oct 2014)
16. one-fabric quilt
17. Houses
18. Paris
19. baby twister
20. baby reflections

to be bound

1. Chain Reaction
2. snowball/9-patch
3. scrappy quilt - 2013
4. Disappearing hour glass

2015 Recap

This post is photo-heavy. I kept them small, so hopefully the loading time wont be too bad for readers.

It's time for me to look back over the past year, review what happened and think about what's next (that last piece is tomorrow's post).  I had been feeling like I didn't get a lot of my own quilting done this year, but apparently I was quite mistaken in that thought.  In actual fact, I finished more quilts and more tops this year than I did last year.  More than 2 a month in fact, which I find really hard to believe but the numbers don't lie.

Finished quilts - 26 of them
The good news is that 13 of them came out of my "to be quilted" pile from the beginning of the year.  So there was some significant reduction there. At least there was before I added all the new ones shown below :) 

Tops quilted this year, from the UFO closet:


Quilts made, start to finish, this year:


Finished tops, ready for quilting - 13 new tops, added to my "to be quilted" pile. The house quilt is currently being quilted, but I'm leaving it in this list anyway, since it won't be finished before the new year.

I see no problem adding more tops to the "to be quilted" pile this year - 5 already in the plans for January, with all the mysteries I'm jumping into.  And 2 new pattern designs I have in mind that I want to make. The challenge is going to be getting my own quilts onto the longarm machine, between customer projects and charity quilting for Victoria's Quilts.



To Be Bound


MIA - possibly donated to Roger's House.  I don't recall quilting this one, but I don't seem to have it here in the to be quilted pile, so I'm hoping it did indeed get finished and I just neglected to photograph the end result.



Quilties - three of these were made this year, the rest are ones I finally finished up and donated.