Many bloggers have shared delightful quilt year retrospectives this week. I was inspired to look back over my quilting year, and I was surprised to find I had only completed TWO quilts this year!
On the other hand, my collection of WIPs (works in progress) seems to just keep growing. I did some cleaning and tidying in the sewing room this fall, and decided it was time to focus on finishing projects. That's my goal for 2015 - to make a serious dent in all the projects in varying states of completion!
Both of this year's completed quilts were started as part of the 2012 Rainbow Scrap Challenge.
I probably would have finished more quilts in 2014, but I developed a reluctance to begin that last step in quilting: applying the binding. Normally, I don't mind the binding process and actually enjoy hand-stitching the binding to the back of the quilt. For some reason, I just could not get excited about binding for most of this year. As a result, there are four quilts in the queue that need binding!
I did manage to get a few flimsies completed this year. There's also another plaid memory quilt - similar to the quilt top in the upper right corner - in the queue for quilting.
The biggest queue is quilt tops in various stages of piecing. I'm embarrassed to fully enumerate all of the languishing projects, so I chose a few to really focus on for the first part of the year.
The birds, flowers and stars are destined to be an applique border for the bowtie blocks below.
The blue and white blocks were a year long leader-ender project of uneven 9 patches and alternate sawtooth stars. All the blocks are finished now and need assembling.
Rounding out the projects are two samplers from 2014. The Rainbow Scrap Sampler was offered by Angela at Soscrappy. I've been participating in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for a couple of years, so doing the sampler was a fun project to share with online scrap-loving friends. I also participated in Barbara Brackman's Austen Family Album, a sampler that focused on author Jane Austen and her friends and relations. I need to finish another half dozen or so blocks for this project before it will be ready for assembly.
There's still at least one more memory quilt to make. That will be a total of 6 quilts made from my father's shirts. I made a good start on the center of the 6th quilt today.
So my goal is to avoid new projects and focus on finishing some of the quilts I've shared today. It will be hard to resist the siren song of fabric and creativity, but I'll be much happier when some of these projects are off the "To Do" list!
