Let's put a bow on it!

 Hello all, and welcome to my 2023 year-end roundup! This is, as always, inspired by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs. If you are new here, welcome! If you've been following along this year, many thanks. I'm extremely grateful that you've hung around through all the drama this year. It has been the best of times and the worst of times, in the sewing room and out. A health crisis, a family crisis, and a brand new roof that leaked all made this year extra challenging, but there was also a lot of happiness and some fun quilty stuff. Come on along as we take a look back. . .

(Clicking on the captions will take you to that post.)

 

Scraps all day

 

2023 was quite challenging, but I did manage to finish up 17 quilts, including one I haven't shown off yet, along with 6 tops, a whole bunch of blocks, and a number of other quilty projects, like table toppers and bags or hot pads. My biggest accomplishment, though, is that I now have four (four!) empty project boxes. Nobody tell the fabric or we all know what will happen! Other than that, here are some of the high points from the year:

 

Most comforting quilt

Comfort twice over

 

I made this quilt top in a very sad time for me, and this year it got quilted up and given to the sister of a friend of mine. This is from the Solstice Sampler, a project run for several years now by Amber at Alderwood Studio. (Pattern for the whole sampler no longer available, sadly.) This was such a good project, and my friend's sister loves the quilt. A comforting win all around!

Most creative project

Neighborhood table

 

Earlier this year, Sandra at mmmquilts offered her yearly quilt along, with an original pattern for a neighborhood of fun houses, along with trees and all kind of other things. (You can get the pattern HERE.) I looked at the pattern and didn't see a quilt but a series of fun placemats. I made six different house placemats from Sandra's pattern and we used them all summer. They held up really well and were a nice cheerful spot every day.

Most satisfying finish

Another dose of mercy

 

For the past several years Gail and friends at Quilting Gail have run the Stay at Home Round Robin, where you make a round robin quilt for yourself instead of passing it around. (Information about this year's round robin is HERE.) For the 2023 project, I challenged myself to use up a bag of coordinating scraps I had saved, and I did that. I also used up a panel I had had for a long time, finished the top, quilted and bound it, and donated the quilt to a palliative care unit. All inside of about 6 months! I am so, so happy with how this whole thing turned out.

 

I also donated a few other quilts to palliative care this year: 

 

Positively grateful, Black and blue and quilted, too

Happiest finish

Fast, fun, and bright

Baby quilts are always really happy, bright, and fun to make. This year I made a bunch of them, but this simple little quilt was one of the happiest. It didn't take long, but I gave it to an administrative assistant at work who has been very, very good to all of us for her first grandchild. She was over the moon, and later sent me a picture of the baby on the quilt. Can you get much happier than that? 

There were also a couple other bright happy baby quilts this year:

 

Jazzing up January, Beauty for a small person

The puzzle finish

 

Puzzle on the front, party on the back

 

Last year I made a quilt top to clean out my green scrap bin, and this year I quilted it with my walking foot and finished it off. This might be my favorite finish from this year just for the backing:

 

It really is a party on the back! I donated this quilt to Quilty Hugs, and I hope someone is enjoying it right now. 

 

There were, of course, many other projects, but these were among the best for this past year. It makes me feel pretty good to look back, because I was convinced that I had finished almost nothing amidst all the issues here this year.

 

Coming in 2024!

 

Quilting is my hobby, not my job, and I've learned that making goals for quilting just stresses me out and makes me tense. So I have no real goals! This year I cleaned out a lot of things (four empty project boxes!) and I guess I'll continue with that. If I cleaned everything out, though, what would I do?  I did sign up for the Dot to Dot Free Motion Quilting Challenge at Quilting is my Therapy (unbelievably, this is free!), and I'll probably make another round robin quilt, and some more baby quilts, but otherwise I just want some fun and relaxation and a respite from the rest of my hectic life.

Blue times two

This brings 2023 to a close for me! Let's wrap it up nicely and put a bow on it, and turn toward a healthier and happier new year. Here's wishing you full bobbins, unbreakable thread, even stitches, and a new year filled with peace and joy. See you when the future gets here, everyone!

 

Linking up with Cheryl's Best of 2023 linky party and maybe a few others, too.

Stitching together 2022

 Hello all, and welcome to the yearly wrap-up here at the Academic Quilter! If you've been reading along this year-- thanks! If you're new, welcome! Today's post is the year-end blog wrap-up, inspired by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs and her Best of 2022 Linky Party. It's always a good time to look back and see what happened this quilty year, and look at some fun accomplishments. Come on along with me down memory lane. . .

 

(Clicking on the captions will take you to that post.)

 

Falling stars in spring

For me, 2022 will always be about one non-quilty thing, but I did manage to get quite a lot of quilty stuff done this year. I finished 15 quilts and another seven tops, plus at least nine "other" quilty projects, like table toppers and a scrap basket, and heaven knows I started a lot more. (Why is starting a quilt so much fun?) That's not too bad, considering the last quarter of the year was pretty much a bust. Here are some of the high points from this year:

Biggest project

 

An easy donation quilt pattern

 

This year's biggest project was the Hands2Help donation quilt challenge. Our friend Sarah was unable to do it this year, so I took it over temporarily. It was a big project and ended up with 562 donated quilts! I learned so, so much, and made some new friends, and some great organizations got great donations. Sarah will be back for the next Hands2Help, and I hope everyone will go over and support this great project. It's so much work, so be sure to give her all the support you can!

Free patterns for donation quilts from many bloggers are still available! Check them all out starting right HERE, and follow the links for many great ideas.

Biggest coincidence

In a completely unplanned and surprising coincidence, I both started and ended the year with buffalo plaid quilts! 

A moose on my quilt, Icy and blue

 

I was really surprised when I looked back at my projects this year and found this coincidence. The moose quilt was a gift for someone and was the first post for 2022, and the blue plaid used up some fabrics from an abandoned project and was the last post. Look for more of these buffalo plaids in the future, too. They're fun and easy.

Most satisfying finish, over which many tears were shed

 

The most satisfying finish of 2022 was a scrappy Snail's Trail with a beachy feel:

 

Catastrophe averted

 This quilt turned out great, but the tears were all about what happened when the tension on the longarm I was renting messed up and I ended up having to pick out a LOT of quilting. Several rows were like this:

 

 

Seriously, I almost gave up, but I managed to get all the bad stitching ripped out, remount it on the longarm, and then finish it off. There is a slight disconnect between the two stitching sessions, but no one will notice it but me. A very satisfying finish for sure, almost a rescue, and it used up so many blue scraps.

 

Favorite accident

 

Every quilter has accidents cutting fabric or stitching it, and the quilt above was certainly a very sad one. However, it was somewhat balanced by this happy accident:

Accidentally modern

 

This was an abandoned quilt backing for a quilt that was never finished, and I quilted it up more for practice than anything else. It turned out great! It's now hanging happily in my hallway outside the bedrooms, and it always makes me smile.

Brightest finish

A lot of my quilts use brights, though I've been trying to branch out this year and incorporate more colors and "feelings" in my quilts. I tried to pick the "brightest" quilt from this year, and was tied on these two that I really love:

Dinosaurs on Parade, Bold Choices

 

Looking at that bright, happy collage, you just can't help but be cheerful, can you? The dinosaurs quilt is from the Stay at Home Round Robin, a quilt along by Quilting Gail and friends, a prolific quilter and blogger who makes lots of stuff, and the other was a quilt I made to test the Synergy pattern by Sew Preeti Quilts. I love the pink background! I need to do stuff like that more often.

Donations were a theme

If this year had a theme, it was donation quilts. Between Hands2Help and other things, I ended up giving away a bunch of quilts, including these:

Clockwise from the big photo: Falling into spring, Cactus Flower, Beothuk Star, Cheerful checkerboard, Handsome,  Arabella's Garden

 

Oops, I see that a quilt I made for my sister-in-law snuck into the collage. It's the cardinals one in the lower left corner there. Oh, well! It did get given away, after all. Three of these went to Mercyful Quilts, which you can read more about HERE, and the others went to a couple of different organizations. I really enjoy the process of making quilts, and I'm even happier to give them away to someone who needs a nice quilty hug.

So there are some categories that pretty much wrap up this quilty year! Except I do feel compelled to add just one more:

 

Clockwise from top left: Evergreen, Arabella, Radiating Stars, Sparkly Stars, Black print challenge

Coming in 2023! My only goal for next year is to get these tops quilted up, and maybe to get the sewing room a little more organized. That's the never-ending story, though, isn't it? I'll probably also make a bunch more donation quilts, and I have a few ideas for the RSC as well. Looking forward to some simple projects that are easy to finish!

Chains and waves

This brings 2022 to an end. For me, it's a chance to turn the page and look ahead to better things, since the end of this year has been quite the beating. Here's to all kinds of creativity for all of us in the new year, and a 2023 filled with peace and joy. See you there!

Linking to Cheryl's Best of 2022 Linky Party. Be sure to check out everyone's posts for tons of quilty goodness!

A different year, in a good way

 Hello all, and welcome to the end of 2021! I hope your holiday went great and you're ready to take a look back at the year that was along with me. It was a different kind of year, in a mostly good way. Certainly less trauma, along with much more fun, interspersed with bouts of bad pandemic news. But I got a vaccine (or three!) and was able to meet my granddaughter who was born during lockdown, and to see my parents, my kids, and several of my siblings and nieces and nephews. That alone makes 2021 a much better year.

I must have spent a lot of time indoors and away from other people in the past year, because I finished a lot of things up this year, including fully completed quilts, unquilted tops, and other quilted things like fabric baskets and table toppers (And masks. I made more of those, too. Ugh.) Many of those projects were several years old already and just came out of the closet and got quilted up. Combine a full closet with lockdowns and social distancing and you have a recipe for many finishes!

There are two quilts that won the popularity contest this year, and they are both bright and happy, which we definitely needed this year:

 

Circling the squares and Joyful

(Clicking on the captions will take you to the post about that quilt!)

Both of these are quilt tops that were in the closet and finally got finished up this year. That's a good argument for cleaning out that closet, isn't it? A much-needed jolt of happiness in a sometimes-dark year.

My personal favorites are also a tie. I finished two quilts that had been in progress for a long time, and now they are actually both on beds in my home:

Cold, clear, and colorful and Paper Dolls

 

In addition to these, there were several other fun, happy quilts completed this year, including this beauty that was a gift for my niece's wedding:

 

A quilt to end the summer

That's a happy way to start married life, isn't it? It was hard to get pictures of this one because I thought I would take pictures at the wedding venue and it didn't really work out, but the bride and groom loved it just the same.

A few more bright, happy finishes:

 

Clockwise: Brown bear, Bear on my Quilt, Sunshine in the Rain,  Lost and found.

 

Some donation quilts: 

Woodsy, Whisper, Violettes

A few baby quilts:

Hippo, Bees, Masala Baby, Bears

 

A special quilt finish for my sister-in-law:

 

Finishing Betty's Quilt

And a couple of tops that will become happy finishes in the new year.:

Snail's Trail and Saguaro

That pretty much rounds out my quilty year! I'm surprised by the roundup, but happy, and grateful that I have friends to share it with. 

Now, let's say thank you to 2021 and bid it goodbye, and get ready to welcome 2022! Wishing you all peace, happiness, and lots of color in the new year. 2022 is bound to have its own challenges, but we've faced down plenty of others, so let's all resolve to look forward with hope and joy, with friends by our side to share it with.

Happy 2022, everyone, with love and good wishes to all!

Pine Tree Point

Sharing at Cheryl's Best of 2021 roundup at Meadow Mist Designs.

What a long, strange year it's been

 Hello everyone, and welcome to the end of 2020! I'm so happy to say that, aren't you? What a year. There's no reason to go through the litany of why I am so glad to see this miserable year come to a close, is there? I'm betting that many of you are feeling the same way. I was going to say "we made it!" but of course that isn't true for too many families. Instead, I'll just say that I'm grateful that my husband and I remained healthy this year, and my parents, kids, and grandkids are all still with us. 

The word of the year for 2020 was STRESS. It's been a very challenging time that felt like several years all piled up together. This year I didn't blog as much as usual, mainly because of the stress and time involved in teaching live classes online, but I did manage to make a bunch of things in 2020. According to the handy spreadsheet that I keep, this year I finished ten quilt tops, nine fully completed quilts, and a very large number of quilty projects, including some quilted scrap baskets and many, many cloth masks. I am amazed by these numbers, because all year I've felt like I was failing at everything.

The most popular finish this year was this lovely quilt:

A tiny bright spot

 

(Clicking on the captions will take you to the post about that quilt!)

This was the quilt top made last year from scraps for the Tiny Tuesday blocks at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, and this year it got quilted and bound. It now hangs in my dining room, and it makes me happy every time I see it.

Next on the list were two quilts that I donated to Mercyful Quilts:

Spring in spite of it all and A little bit of mercy

 Readers certainly liked these and I enjoyed creating them. I hope they are now comforting families in this year of so much suffering.

I made a bunch of cheerful things this year, but by far the most cheerful was the quilt I made for my nephew:

O is for orange

 

I called this quilt Big Orange, and it certainly seemed like a ray of sunshine in a dark winter.

And speaking of cheerful, is there anything more cheerful than yellow?

Wrong Turns

 

I quilted this one with a walking foot and kept turning the wrong way, but it turned out to be quite cute anyway. 

I also finished two star quilts with blue backgrounds:

Constellations and Galaxy Stars

One of these now lives with my daughter, and the other is in the guest room in case anyone ever somes to visit again. Funny how many of my quilts have walked off to my kids' houses.

My personal favorite finish for the year is this lovely autumn flower quilt:

Autumn abounds

And then, of course, there are the unfinished tops, which I am determined to get finished up in the new year: 

Colorful summer finish, Child's play, Rainbows in the pines, and Rising from the leaves

As for non-quilt quilty projects, I spent a lot of time making (expletive deleted) masks:

I'm sure you all made a ton of these too! I think I made about 60, all told, but I have friends who made hundreds. You are all better people than me! These were necessary, but almost zero fun to make, though I'm happy they're keeping people safe.

I also made a bunch of quilted scrap baskets:

I didn't get to make every color, so I'll finish those up for next year's RSC.

And I ended the year with a doll quilt that lives here, waiting for some small person to (finally) come over and play:

Small but satisfying

All in all, looking back has been a really good exercise, because in all the stress I lost sight of what I had already accomplished. Overall, it was a better quilty year than I thought! There is plenty left to do in the new year, though, so I'm sure I won't run out of projects.

So, now that we've looked back, let's look forward, shall we? On to goals for 2021!

Quilty goals for 2021

At the end of a year with all of my personal and professional goals in pieces at my feet, (totally not joking!) I'm really unsure what to have as goals for next year. I'm just keeping it simple with these few:

--Get the remaining unquilted tops quilted or donated (or both!)

--Continue cleaning out and repurposing UFOs

--Finally finish a quilt for our bed (already in progress!)

--Work on things that make me happy, without a real schedule

--Be true to my own aesthetic

--Learn one new skill or take on one new challenging project (maybe this will wait until after the pandemic!)

--A personal goal for 2021: find some kind of ~balance~ after a year of almost unrelenting stress

That seems like a set of goals that I can actually accomplish this coming year. (Any resemblance between last year's goals and this year's is strictly coincidental!) I'll leave it to someone else to figure out how we can manage to continue wearing sweatpants all the time once we have to actually go in to work again. 

Finally, here at the end of the worst year ever, I want to thank all of you for coming around and reading my ramblings, offering funny and supportive comments, and being a fun community to belong to. It's good to have friends, now more than ever.

And with that, we're kicking 2020 to the curb and moving on to 2021! Wishing you all peace, joy, and happiness in the new year. This coming year will be different, and with any luck, it will be different in good ways, so let's make it good with plenty of color, fabric, and community in our little corner of the Internet.

Happy 2021, everyone, and peace and joy to all!

Sharing with Cheryl's Best of 2020 linky party at Meadow Mist Designs, and Yvonne's 2021 Planning Party at Quilting Jetgirl.

    

A lively, lovely year

Hello quilty friends! It appears that we have reached the end of 2019. Whew--we made it!  When this year began, I had no idea the many changes it would bring, both good and bad, for me and my family, for our country, and for the world. What a lot of changes we've experienced! There was a lot of upheaval, but I'm ending this year with a heart full of gratitude and a lot of optimism.  Let's take a look back and relive some happy quilty moments, then maybe make a few small goals for next year, shall we?  Here we go. . .

According to my handy-dandy quilty records, I finished 18 quilty projects this year.  Yahoo! This seems like a lot to me because of the move and everything that came with it, which derailed many of my plans for the year.  The most popular project this year was this little topper:

Wildflowers topper

(Captions link to the original posts)

Started at the old house, finished at the new one! It surprises me that this was so popular, but it is super cute and now lives on a small table in my living room, where it can be a bright spot in my day. And look-- it's quilted and bound! Kind of different for this year.

I made some other small quilts this year, too, including these two for my daughter's cats:

Pets need quilts too

Hey, our furry friends need love, too!  I also did two small ones for charity:

Jack and Jill

And this one from a quilt along from Sandra:

Beothuk Stars

 You know I do a bunch of scrappy projects every year (because I'm swimming in scraps), and I finished a few tops for those, too.  This was an RSC project that got put together into a top:

Twelve hundred and more

And so was this one (still not quilted!):

Dancing Stars

My RSC  Squared Away top from 2018 got quilted up and is in my living room:

Squared Away

And I pieced two tops for the RSC so far this year, this little beauty:

Hollow 9-patches

And this one too:

Tiny Tuesday top

I did a lot of other things, too. I made a baby book:

Soft signs of love

And some bigger tops:

Okay, the one on the upper left is a finished quilt that now lives in my office, which is either boiling or freezing, depending on the day (or sometimes on the hour.)

And a lot of blocks:

And I even requilted a quilt I had previously finished:

Ripped and restitched

That was quite a lot of stitching! And a lot of fun, too, for the most part. Now that we've looked back some, let's take a look ahead, shall we?

2020 plans

Before I wrote this post, I felt like I had had a "rebuilding" year, one where you fail a lot but set yourself up for future success.  Somehow moving 90 miles was harder than moving 900 miles, and a lot of my plans got derailed. I accomplished *none* of my 2019 goals-- not one!-- because life kept getting in the way, but I think now that it turned out okay anyway. Some of it certainly turned out pretty!

For our next quilty year, I think I'll stick with some smaller goals.  I'll keep working on getting those tops quilted up into cozy, comforting pieces, get back on some kind of posting schedule, and (finally) launch Academic Quilts, the small quilt pattern company I've been planning and working on sporadically.  I'm hung up on the illustrations, but much of it is ready to go, so it's past time to get that going.  I was also thinking of starting a Wednesday "work in progress" link up, but I've done no planning for that at all, and I don't know how it would be received. Wouldn't want to give a party and have no one show! I do like link parties, though, especially ones where you can get to be a regular, so let me know if that's something you'd be interested in, too.

My main goal, though, is to leave more comments, visit more often, and keep on building this wonderful, supportive, and fun community.  This year especially, your comments and suggestions have really buoyed my spirits and your projects have provided so much inspiration.  I am grateful for all of you and for this community. It's good to be among friends!

Hope and kindness

And with that, it's on to 2020! Wishing you nothing but peace, joy, and happiness in the new year.  May this be our best year yet! Let's pledge to fill it with hope, kindness, gratitude, and joy-- and lots of fabric, thread, color, and quilty goodness, too, of course!

Happy new year, all!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, Cheryl's Best of 2019 at Meadow Mist Designs, and Yvonne's 2020 Planning Party at Quilting Jetgirl.