Blogging and Quilting in 2013

Another year ahead...we all hopefully receive 365 days to fill with whatever we value and desire.
This is what I am planning to fill my time with:

*handwork - I want to do more hand quilting and beading, and signed up for the Bead Journal Project 2013!  
I participated in the 2007 BJP and really enjoyed it, but that year I made my monthly goal too ambitious and my project size too large (8" x 11"). I did manage to finish many of the pieces, which I will make a post about sometime soon. I learned my lesson and this is my plan for my 2013 project:
1) start each month with a word, a verb, which I will bead and/or stitch,
2) fill in the rest of the space in an intuitive way, as I originally learned from Robin. She calls it improvisational, I call it intuitive ("Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive"), and
3) stitch the 12 projects together at the end of 2013 as a mosaic memory of my year.
                           
*simplicity... buy less and use up what I already have. 
So I will participate again in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.                                            

I have been participating in Angela's scrappy challenge for two years and have enjoyed all the projects I have worked on. Sometimes I have worked on projects that were UFO's in the colour of the month, sometimes I have started new projects just for fun, and I have regularly tried to use up the scraps I have accumulated over years of quilting. It has been a very rewarding experience to participate in this challenge, and I have planned to finish some ongoing projects, and start some new ones, which I'll write more about on Saturday.

*less deadlines - I try so hard to meet them and stress myself out too much at times, so I plan to commit to fewer projects with deadlines and hope I can keep to that. I am only planning to sign up for 1 new project which is a quilt I really like and for which I already found fabric in my stash.

Blogger Girls BOM    
    
Having said that, I did sign up for one approaching deadline because I couldn't resist!! LOL I am participating in the "In Yours Words" blog hop, so look for my Word quilt (next week Wednesday I think... hope to finish the quilting over the weekend...
yikes, more pressure, which is what I said I didn't want!!)                                                                     

*finish more UFO's - Judy has changed the format of the UFO challenge for the coming year and is calling it a "Get It Done" challenge. 

But since I liked the old format, I'm going to stick with that for another year and see how it goes. My new UFO wish list (as in "I sure wish it was done"!)  for 2013 will appear on the right sidebar of my blog when I whittle it down to 12 projects! I just plan to work away at a project each month, and hope to finish it, or at least move it closer to becoming a completed quilt!

And that's my list for 2013! Seems manageable and doable, if I actually stick to my plan!