January Review

January has been a very productive month.  Earlier last year, I took a bag of 6" fabric squares from the Community Outreach table at guild to make into a quilt.  At retreat last year, I was using these as enders and leaders to stitch into  9 patches.  Late last year, I finally dug them out from the bottom of the table, finished piecing the 9 patches (while piece 6" blocks for the 365 quilt!) and then did a disappearing 9-patch with them.  The top is now ready to take to the guild meeting this week.

The 365 quilt got quilted and bound.  It still wants a label and hanging sleeve which I should finish shortly.  There were some bonus blocks that I want to make to use in the label.  For the binding, I wanted the colours to change as it went around including some changes in corners.  A google search  lead me to Cheryl Arkinson's wonderful tutorial on how to do this.  I actually found the corners much easier to deal with than the usual continuous bias that I use. 

The Quilts of Valour hugs block got made and is ready to mail (I forgot to get a picture before I sealed up the envelope) and two floating star blocks for the guilds outreach program got made.  That pattern had been lost on the cutting table for a long time so I'm not sure if they still want them.  Guess I'll find out at the meeting.
Yesterday my sister and I went out to Whirls and Swirls and played at the front of the long arm.  I have some quilts I'd like to do on the long arm but not use a pantograph so it was an afternoon of playing.  First up was just a small piece that I tucked some insul-bright into.  I'm making thermos covers for when we hike and needed to quilt before making the covers so figured I might as well make use of the quilt sample.  Then I put a top on that was the result of a block exchange many years ago and did free motion quilting on it.  I'm please with how it turned out.  The binding is added, it just needs to be stitched down. I'll get a better picture of this once its finished.

And finally, my One Monthly Goal for January was to get caught up with the guilds block of the month.  I had just done step one at the beginning of the month -- pick fabrics.  Since then I've completed October to January and now have a stack of 48 rail fence blocks with half square triangles added to two corners and the cutoffs stitched and pressed into squares

Status at the beginning of the month

Status at the end of the month

This was also my goal for Elaine's Motivational Monday.  The balance of the goal there is to keep up with the steps as I pick them up over the balance of this guild year.  As part of Motivational Monday, I've been keeping a list of what I'd like to get done each week.  As things get done, they get marked off.  Its been really nice to look back over the month to date lists and see what all did get accomplished with my quilting.  Next up is to pick one of the projects I've identified for this year and plot out what will happen to it in February.