Mid Year Check-in

In December, I wrote about some goals for this year in this post. I wrote about some progress in February here. Yvonne at Quilting JetGirl, who organized the 2016 Planning Party, has a mid year check-in which was a reminder to write a new post.

Quilting:

1. Finishing Quilts. In March, I quilted Mom's Patchwork Sampler quilt then went back in April and quilted the black, white, red and grey quilt and a photo transfer quilt. The Patchwork sampler quilt is the from the same class with Elaine that mine quilted in January was from. The Black, White, Red and Grey was a mystery quilt Chip of the old block. I'm still stitching the binding down on this one. The photo transfer quilt was a top I'd done years ago at the old Streetsville store about 1996. This was a small quilt but I wanted to play with some free motion quilting on the long arm. I've now completed finished 3 of my quilts, almost finished a fourth one and finished two of Mom's. The second one of Mom's was one she was hand quilting and I finished that before we went to Iowa. It went to Mom's sister.

Mom's Sampler Quilt

My Black, Red and White quilt.  

Photo quilt is hiding on the bottom

Mom's Confetti Quilt

2. 365 Quilt. This is going really well. I am up to date on this one. I was behind about 12 days when we drove down to Iowa. I had one plan to get caught up but that didn't work so came up with another plan and that one worked. The centre is put together and I have a growing stack of blocks for the next dark border. Having a set of fabrics that I'm pulling from and a set colour rotation has made some of the decisions easier. It gets a little longer when I try to pull from the scrap bins as pawing through the scraps is slow. One thing I found when doing the light round was a distinct lack of very light coloured fabrics, especially reds and oranges.

365 Quilt First two borders

3. The Love Entwined goes to guild with me and gets stitched there. It went for a ride to Iowa with me but never came out of its bag to get worked on. Not sure why not. The bits and pieces are slowly getting stitched down. I still think I'm just doing the centre but whenever I see someone post the full quilt, I'm tempted to continue.  At the moment the top is draped over the arm of my lazy boy and I'm doing some stitching as I watch tv.

 4/6 Haven't touched the guild workshop samples, or the common bride quilts yet this year other than to move them out of my way.

5.  Earlier this week I took down the 365 quilt to date so I have the design wall free to work on something else.  We started on t-shirt quilts the other week and as I trimmed the blocks, I put them up.  I want to use my biggest ruler to trim the last few shirts but my sister has the ruler so the tshirts came down and the one block wonder blocks went up.  Then the other night I finally cut the other set of strips and blocks.  I've been stitching those together and my collection of blocks is growing.  I'm thinking about how I want to complete the top (include hollow cubes?  put a piece of the fabric in the centre ) -- especially as I found fabric for a second quilt. :)

trimmed tshirts

One Block wonder blocks.  

 7. I picked up a new bag from the outreach table and made a number of 9-patch blocks. They need a good pressing and then I'll do some form of disappearing 9-patch with them.

Photography

1. I'm pleased with my progress in Ricky Tim's class. I posted a review of the first 6 months here. I have signed up for part two over the next 3 months.

2. Organize the photos I already have. I kept losing track of which months are done and which months are still to be done.  I use Lightroom to organize my photos and it has colour labels which I don't use.  So I choose a colour and changed its label to be  "Review Photos Label, edit, keyword.  Press 8 to remove colour when done"  The colours are each assign a number by Lightroom so all I had to do was select all the photos and press the number 8.  Now as I go through and label and select the ones to keep, I remove the colour label. It seems to be working well.  I also had collections setup in lightroom that let me look at all the pictures taken in any one month so can either work on a specific year or all the January pictures for example.  There are still a lot of photos to go through but atleast I don't get lost in whats done and what isn't.