A Recap of my Quilting Year 2023

 

 

Image by GDJ from Pixabay.

In this post, I go over my posts during the year and give you a summary of the quilts I made, and any big events. I make a yearly recap every year. In 2021, I did not have any rules - I could start and finish as many quilts as I wanted without any guilt. The key was just to enjoy the journey. This lead to some fun finishes in 2022, but the number of unfinished quilts grew. Then I created a rule to finish more quilts than I started. I continued the rule to finish more than I started. Let's see how that affected my quilting.

January

I started January with a strong start, with a Project Quilting challenge, The First One. All Project Quilting challenges require that the quilt be started after the theme is announced and be completed within the week. This week's challenge was to make one of something. I decided to make one tree from a pattern by Irene from Sugaridoo called One Two Tree. I gave it a very creative name, One Tree. It is so much easier to remember the name of a quilt when you give it the name that was your working title.

I had so much fun with the fast finish of One Tree, I finished the I've Got Your Back camel.

I made more blocks for the Jazzy Blues quilt.

I finished this quilt, Sonder, as a Project Quilting challenge which required the color pink. This one was a lot of fun to make. I enjoyed the combination of whimsy and elegance.

Sonder: The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own -- populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness -- that you'll never know existed..

February 

 

In February, I made Boundaries for another Project Quilting challenge. was to make a quilt inspired by the 54-40 or Fight quilt pattern, but I stretched the rules to use a different pattern to describe a boundary. These challenges really help with my productivity. 

 

I made more Circle 365 blocks. I pressed and trimmed some Jazzy Blues blocks. I started the Boundless quilt for the  Dust Off an Old Quilt Book blog hop.

I made Zou the Elephant as a part of a Project Quilting challenge to make a quilt inspired by a book. I had gotten an AI drawn elephant and had wanted to put that in quilt form so I was able to combine the challenge with something else I wanted to do. Zou means elephant in Japanese so Zou the Elephant is equivalent to saying chai tea.

I also made some other things, like these hearts, and a scrappy ball. I also started the Unallocated quilt and the Spicy Stars quilt. These starts are not helpful to my challenge to finishing more than I start

March

 In March, I used some scraps from the hearts I made to quickly meet a challenge for Project Quilting, Sew Not a Square. It is the one in the middle called Mended Heart.

I presented my Boundless quilt for the blog hop but I wasn't finished quilting it in time.

 

I made the final Project Quilting challenge quilt, Fear of the Missed Deadline, using scraps from my Spare Parts box. It was about conquering a fear.

April

 In April, I was able to show the quilted and finished the Boundless quilt which was made for the Dust Off an Old Quilt Book blog hop.

I made Whose Rights? from the scraps of the Boundless quilt.

I also worked on the Spicy Stars quilt.

May

Work continued to be busy in May with overtime, so I wasn't able to do much quilting.

June

June was also a busy time at work, but I did find some time to make progress on my works in progress - the Aunt Daisy blocks, Spicy Stars and Unallocated, as well as making small amounts of progress in my sewing room.

July

I kept working on the Spicy Stars blocks. I made a lot of portraits for my index card drawings.

On the 29th, I started a Youtube channel, Quilt and Color, and showed my first completed art journal.

August

In August, I wasn't working, so I made some paintings and focused on learning how to make YouTube videos. It is a steep learning curve to know what supplies I need while trying to limit my investment, learn how to use the equipment, and decide how to make videos without being boring.

I started making the index card portraits quilt based on the index card portraits I was making. It was slow since I was recording a tutorial for it, but it was fun to explain the process without having a scripted speech.

September

In September, I finished the Portraits quilt, Making Friends, and published a YouTube tutorial for it. I enjoyed that so much, I brought out my Tuxedo Vest quilt to see what I can do  to finish it.

October

In October, I finished Tuxedo Vest by appliquéing African fabric on top. I made a YouTube video about the process. I renamed the quilt, African Garden.

November

In November, I published videos that told the story of some of my finished quilts. I didn't get much time this month to work on a quilt, but producing videos about the finished quilts and getting ready to produce a video a day in December where I will work on my quilts for 15 minutes a day made it difficult to count whether I was successful in quilting every day.

December

In December, I did a lot of quilting. I pulled out a lot of my works in progress and made and published a video every day to show how the 15 minutes to quilt worked for me. I thought it would be more interesting for people to see different projects in different stages. It was a lot of fun to get reacquainted with them, and the ones that seemed scary wound up being perfectly fine. I had made a decision early on that I would show my mistakes and how I dealt with them, so there wasn't a pressure for me to be perfect in my quilting, and since I had to make a video a day, I didn't have time to fret about being perfect with my videos either. 

There were some frustrations with my tripods not working right, and my using the wrong setting on my microphone (it has to be on "off" when using the phone but on "on" when using the camera), and the software deleted my whole video a couple of times, especially when I had used the narrate feature which meant I had to start over with the narration as well as putting the clips together. I found it easier to start over instead of trying to fix some things in editing so many times I worked more than 15 minutes on a project.

I learned a lot about my UFOs and about videos, so it was very successful for me.

I even snuck in some extra time to finish this Scrappy Cat. It uses scraps from the I've Got Your Back camel you saw in January.

Recap

 

So how did I do with my finish more than you start goal? I finished 12 quilts and only started 11 so I am officially successful! I actually made more progress than the numbers show because I made lots of progress on my other quilts a little bit throughout the year, and especially in December. Most of my WIPs at the back of the line were able to officially move up a little bit, not just because a quilt at the front of the line got finished, but also because they themselves were more completed than they started at the beginning of the year. 

 

I want to thank Wendy for her small quilt of the month challenge. Even though it has been discontinued, I am continueing to enjoy making a small quilt a month. I especially want to thank Kate for her 15 minutes to stitch challenge. I also want to thank Kim for the Project Quilting challenges. All three people have helped motivate me and gave me "permission" to enjoy myself and spend time quilting. I also want to thank all of my blog readers for coming and reading my ramblings. Your support means a lot to me.

Quilt Reveal: Scrappy Cat Collage Mini Quilt

 I am continuing to make progress on each of my quilts fifteen minutes a day. It is a lot of fun to pull out the old projects and make some progress on them, but it is hard to put them away when the fifteen minutes is over. I've been really good about staying organized and putting the projects back to make room for the next projects. I think they will be easier to bring them back out again in 2024 to get them finished off.

Here's a quilt I finished.

This quilt was started in September 2019. I wanted to make another fabric collage quilt, so I collaged a bunch of little strips of fabric on some fusible. There is a link here with a mini tutorial.  I cut out some animal shapes and even eventually finished a camel and a giraffe quilt out of this one sheet of fused fabric.

This month, I am bringing out each of my old works in process and I quilted the scrappy cat  as one of the projects on my Youtube channel, Quilt and Color. 

I only did the quilting on the video, but since I was so close to the finish, I added the words and the binding after the video was over. This quilt wasn't on my list of quilts in progress because it was a scrap from the camel quilt, and not technically its own project, but I am counting it anyway. Like I did last time for the giraffe, I will add it with the start date of the camel quilt and the current end date.

 Circle Block 280

 

On another day, I worked on the Quilty 365 quilt. Since I have been showing closeups on this blog, I wanted to make sure I included them here. This one uses the background fabric from the Portraits quilt. The red is from Boundless, the blues are from Seaglass rooftops, the blue on the right and the orange are from Rey and the Death Star.

 Circle Block 281

  

This one uses the red and blue from Rey and the Death Star, the blue from Seaglass Rooftops and the green is from the Olympics quilt.

Circle Block 282

This one uses the green from Olympics, the background snake fabric is from the Portraits quilt, the light green is from the backing of Zou the Elephant.

 Circle Block 283

The red fabric is from the binding of Boundless quilt

 

Bad Blogging but Good Quilting

 I can't believe it has been a month since I posted last. I have been quilting everyday. I can prove it because I have recorded what I have worked on each day and posted it on my YouTube channel as a part of the 15 Minutes to Quilt Challenge. It has been a lot of fun taking out one of my many WIPs and getting 15 minutes of progress on each of them.

You are welcome to join in on the challenge if you would like. The 15 Minutes to Stitch has been such a great motivator that I thought I would show how much work can get done, and motivate others to quilt for 15 minutes also. Here's today's video, which is Day 10.

 

You can start here and work your way back to Day 1 if you are interested. There is a link at the end of each video to the previous day's video.

I don't know how much credit to take for November, but I know that this week is definitely 100%. 

Linked to:

Kate Life in Pieces 15 Minutes to Stitch

Quilting Progress

 

I didn't realize I was this far behind in reporting my progress for 15 minutes to stitch. I thought I just missed one week. How time flies. It has gotten really hard for me to decide what to count as stitching this month.

For the first two weeks, I know that I didn't do any stitching, but I have been recording and editing videos that tell people about each of my quilts. My family asked me to make videos telling the story of each quilt, and it has been really fun to do that, even though it takes me a lot of time to film and edit the videos. I had been planning on putting all the quilts in a photo book, but this is a little easier, since I can work on one quilt at a time instead of getting together all my thoughts and records about all my quilts for a book. So even though I have been immersed in quilting, I didn't make any progress on any of my quilts, so I am counting the stitching time as zero.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 42, 43, 44, and 45

 

For the next two weeks, I have started recording videos for Vlogmas, where YouTubers post a video every day.  I have decided to show my viewers how much work they can get done in 15 minutes. This will keep me from having to come up with a new idea every day. 

I will be working in December, during daylight hours, so I have been trying to record these videos now, and will be editing them in the evenings to post them in December. To keep the videos interesting, I am bringing out a new unfinished quilt every day, but that leaves me feeling like I have to put away incomplete things. I normally don't switch to another quilt until I have finished that step of the process, at least one block. This means that I have continued to work on a quilt even after the 15 minutes of recording is finished.

15 minute days these weeks --14 out of 28

15 minute days this year -- 227 out of 316 days

Success rate  = 72%

 

 

Linked with:

 15 Minutes to Stitch follow this link to see all the other people who participate in this challenge

Quilt Reveal: African Garden

 

I finished the quilt formerly known as Tuxedo Vest. Since the name is based on the fabrics on what is now the background, I am changing the name to African Garden to refer to the applique which is now the focal point.

This was the quilt as I left it in 2021. It was supposed to be a simple baby quilt, but I don't know anyone who would want it as a baby quilt. I thought about keeping it, but I would need a lap quilt so my original plan was to add more columns and make it larger. But it didn't motivate me to continue.

When I finished the Portraits quilt and listed the chart that I include every time I start or finish a quilt, I realized that I needed to get some more finishes in order to meet my very easy goal of finishing more quilts than I start.

 

I pulled out the Tuxedo Vest quilt but kept it in my bedroom until I was ready to work on it in an effort to keep the sewing studio clean for the YouTube videos.

 

I bought a bunch of African fabrics and put them in the same staging area in my bedroom until I was ready to film them. Placing them together like that with the Tuxedo Vest quilt gave me the idea that I could use them to applique on the quilt.

 

I was originally thinking of adding just one or two motifs  to help the floral fabric and the stripe fabric work better together. I cut out a bunch of motifs to try them out on the quilt,  and I couldn't reject any of them, so I used all of the ones I cut.

I used my general technique to combine the applique and the quilting. I secured the edges of the appliue and then stippled the background.

 I tried to add a piece from an older quilt, but they are shiny, and I decided to use this piece from the stash of fabrics.  I think I have used some of the background fabric in another quilt so the continuity is there, and I can use scraps of this quilt in another quilt.

 

I made a YouTube video about the process if you are interested in seeing that.

I've made a lot of quilts this year but I need to finish at least one more to meet my goal of finishing more quilts than I start. One thing about keeping records, I know it is not a record year in terms of started or finished quilts.

Celebrating Zoey's Gotcha Day

 

Zoey joined my family on September 15 last year, and on October 3, I added a post here on this blog about her as a way to document her growth and progress.

Interestingly, not much has changed with her. Most of the changes are mine. When I first got her, I kept wondering if her energy and her past traumas were too much for me to handle. She doesn't jump on me or put my hands in her mouth as often as she used to, mostly because she is more comfortable with me and doesn't get as frightened or nervous as she used to. She has separation anxiety so she will jump on me or pull at my clothes when I come back from taking the trash out for pickup.

 Mostly though, I am no longer afraid that she is going to bite me or hurt me when she jumps on me.

 

She finds the ripe passion-fruit and plays ball with it until it breaks and then she eats it. She is much better than I am at determining which passion-fruit is ripe enough to eat so she gets more than I do. In the picture above, you can see a yellowish green walnut and beside that is the darker green passion-fruit. 

I tried to put a daisy on her head like I had put the dandelion in a previous post, but she decided she would rather know whether I still love her. 

Yes I definitely do. I am so happy she is here. She still loves her squeaky ball and carries it around with her, even to bed. The one that fits her mouth is small enough to roll under the couch and furniture, so I have to keep getting them for her. 

Now that firework season is gone, I have reduced her anxiety medicine. She no longer chews on furniture or baseboards when I am gone, but I still try to stay home as much as possible or get a sitter for her when I have to go anywhere for more than an hour. She walks around the house crying and looking for me.

I haven't added any more talking buttons to the board, but she loves to use them to tell me she loves me, to ask for food, and to ask to go outside. When I tell her to wait, she will wait a few minutes and will remind me when the few minutes are over. I am glad she does that.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 41

 

I spent these weeks quilting and binding African Garden quilt. That's it in the picture at the top of the post. I am really happy with how it turned out. One of my determining factors about whether  quilt is successful is how it looks when it is all rumpled up, and this one definitely makes me happy. Even when you can't see the pattern, the colors make it so pretty.

15 minute days these weeks --14 out of 14

15 minute days this year -- 213 out of 288 days

Success rate  = 74%

 

 

Linked with:

 15 Minutes to Stitch follow this link to see all the other people who participate in this challenge

Progress on Tuxedo Vest

 

I bought a bunch of African fabrics. I know them as Kitenge, which is what they are called in East Africa. They are known as Ankara in West Africa. I showed them all in a Youtube video.

I fussy cut some of them and am appliquéing them to the Tuxedo Vest quilt. It looks very different now from where it started. It will be finished shortly.

Looking at it now, I am reminded of a Jane Sassaman quilt that was a garden. I had put it on my mental list of quilts to make a long time ago. I can't find the picture now, but it makes me happy that I am retroactively able to cross that quilt off my to-do list.

Yesterday, I found an art quilter who uses Ankara fabrics to make art quilts, Marcellina Oseghale Akpojotor. She was featured on the Colossal, which features different artists every day. They remind me of the dimensional pinecone quilts that were in a book I recently saw, even though these quilts aren't made with triangles.

I also want to bring your attention to American Quilt Society Worldwide Quilt Parade that is going on right now. I submitted three quilts to that parade. I am from Ohio, if you want to find them faster. You can vote for quilts you like there if you want.

15 Minutes to Stitch Week 39 and 40

 

I spent these weeks admiring the African fabrics and cutting and appliquing them to the Tuxedo Vest quilt. Eventually I will rename this quilt. Right now I am thinking of Kintenge Garden or Ankara Garden.

15 minute days these weeks --14 out of 14

15 minute days this year -- 199 out of 274 days

Success rate  = 73%