Happy New Year

It's a new year and this year I am not going to make any resolutions - I never manage to keep them and just wind up disappointed.  What I am going to do is continue to work towards achieving my quilting goals and let the chips fall where they may.

I am a sporadic quilter and blogger so my first goal is to move towards rectifying that. 

I really don't know how people out there manage to achieve so much each week.  I am flat out working, running kids here and there and keeping the house in good order (well somewhat order anyway).  When I do have time to myself it is usually spent reading about peoples quilting adventures on their blogs instead of working on my own quilts and blog!

I absolutely love Leah Days' Free Motion Quilting Project but found that I could never keep up with the week to week assignments and was left feeling somewhat inadequate.  I am going to persevere because I adore Leah's new project and really want to participate.  I may not be able to keep pace but I am not going to beat myself up about it.

I thought I would also join in her Free Motion Friday & UFO Sunday linky parties as a way of keeping in touch.   Even though I do not always link, I read all of the blogs every week and love seeing what everyone is up to.  

I am also keen to participate in Lee's WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced. I like the idea of sharing works in progress (whatever stage they may be in).  This way I do not have to keep to a schedule - I can plod along at my own pace and share what I have done (if anything) whilst drooling over what all of the very clever people out in blogland are doing.

I just have to find a balance between all of this blogging (posting and reading) and working on my projects.

So onto my WIP's.

I finally finished a quilt I made for my sisters 50th birthday.  Mind you, her birthday was in March 2012! This top has been basted since February but I really wanted to fmq it myself and l was not confident enough to do it.  It hung in my sewing room waiting, waiting until finally last week I got sick of looking at it I so dove right in.

As this was my first attempt at free motion quilting (other than stippling) on a 'biggish' quilt I stuck with a relatively simple all over quilting design.  I do not know what it is called - I think I must have seen it somewhere and it stuck in my head.  I drew it out on paper for a day until I was satisfied I had it firmly lodged in my muscle memory.  Here is a picture of the quilting detail.

With the left over fabric I threw together a small quilt top.  There was no pattern or designing here. I literally sewed the fabric into strips of different lengths and then without any thought, rhyme or reason I randomly sewed the strips to 1" strips of black and this is the result.

I am not sure if I am going to leave this as is or put a border on it. I am leaning towards no border but I will ponder it for a bit longer.  I want to quilt it with concentric circles (maybe overlapping?) so it will probably sit for 12 months whilst I get the courage up to do them!

I have another 7 flimsy's waiting to be sandwiched and quilted.  I am also working on Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt "Easy Street" as well as trying to complete the blocks from Randy at Barristers Block sew along.  More on my progress with these next week.

Sue