Quilt Rotation

It's time for quilt rotation...every month I change the quilts hanging in my home. I have taken down the January ones and put up the Valentine's theme quilts. This is still one of my old favorites that I called "Heart Patches"...a very simple miniature quilt with 1.5" 9 patch blocks on point, with hand quilted hearts. It is hanging in the dining room.
On the left is another old favorite from my days of block swaps. In the centre are 6" swap blocks

from a Valentine's Day exchange in 1997 and around the outside border are 3" blocks from a "Nine patch Niblets" block exchange in 1998. It took me a long time (years!) to put this wallhanging together and was my first experience with the large range of measurements in the quilting world. A 6" block to one quilter is a 5.5" or 6.5" block to another! I finally figured out to sash the 6" blocks to make them go together, and the 9 patch blocks I just trimmed liberally and made them fit. This quilt is hanging in the living room.

I really learned a lot from my block swapping days in the 90's and it was always lots of fun to get the "squishies" in the mail. I still have lots of blocks sitting around my quilting room...everything from the hourglass and 9 patch block exchanges, to beautiful star blocks. I had to stop participating in the swaps because I just couldn't keep up with using up all the blocks and getting the projects quilted...too many UFO's accumulated.

This week I am starting to plan which projects to take along to a quilting retreat coming up at the end of the month, and I'm sure at least one of those projects will involve using up some of my blocks from internet swaps. At last year's retreat I stressed myself out by setting goals that were too ambitious. I think I took 9 projects to work on, and tried to do some work on each of them. This year I am taking fewer projects and focusing more on the relaxation part of the reatreat. I hope February passes quickly!