My Quilt Thoughts for 2011

My new background is part of the center of a quilt I made several years ago using the Square in a Square ruler. I liked using it for it’s accuracy, but it left me with a lot of light bonus triangles. I used many of them for the Northwinds quilt and still have a lot more. This is one of the few quilts I didn’t think afterward "I should have done that differently". When I get a good photo of it I'll show you the whole thing. Is it too busy as the background? Let me know if you prefer the plain background. If you don’t want to comment, you can send me an email by clicking on my profile.

My challenge for 2011 is to make significant progress on one of these UFO’s. I know I will always have UFO’s, but I’d like them to be younger!

This Stars and Stepping Stones is the one I think I know what I want to do with – at least to start. It needs some appliqué – I’m thinking a vine and flowers around that light edge. What do you think? This is a square right now (about 50”) and I’d like to make it a rectangle. Do you think it would look odd if I added some piecing to two opposite sides?

These are blocks from a New York Beauty pattern by Karen K. Stone. I started it in a class and never touched it afterward. I really just need to start doing it again, but I’m not a fan of paper piecing though I do like the accuracy of it. Curved seams! I think this is the only time I've ever done them - little nervous about that.

This is from a lone star class taken with Paula Golden. She was a great teacher, but again, I didn’t work on it right away. When I did go back to it, I didn’t know what I was doing and when I put the diamonds together, well, they didn’t go together. I think I will give it another try and if they don’t fit I might just appliqué them to the background. Not sure if that will work either. Was also thinking I could cut the diamonds in half and do something with them as triangles. Any ideas?

I also have some tops that need quilting. Piecing is definitely my favorite part of quilting. I do have a hand quilting project that I started last year using wool batting. It was going very well, but then I got into other things. I started doing it 15 minutes a day and I need to go back to that. In the queue for machine quilting is the Christmas quilt and a string quilt – Bonnie Hunter’s Virginia Bound pattern. I’m scheduled with The Finishing Touch to have a full size pink/brown snowball/9-patch quilted this month. Yippee! I'll only have to do the binding to finish that one.

Yesterday, my daughter and I went to the Winterthur quilt exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. We saw an intricately quilted whole cloth quilt that took the quilter only about a year to finish (1815). I said to my daughter that this woman didn't have TV and computer and probably spent hours a day on it.  It is something to think about. We have more things competing for our time, but we want to finish lots and lots of quilts. It's something I struggle with in many aspects of my life - all the quilts I want to make, books I want to read, volunteer activities I want to do, etc. It feels like I'm always thinking of what I should or could be doing instead of enjoying what I am doing. That is something I want to work on this year. While I do want to finish most of the quilts I start, I don’t think I’m going to put a number on how many I want to complete this year like I did last year. That was a good jumpstart, but I think I am now in full quilting mode. LOL This year I want to be more in the moment and work on some of these challenging projects. Thanks to all you bloggers out there who got me thinking about this (especially Lori, at Humble Quilts). BTW, the Winterthur exhibit was very good.