End of 2014

At the end of the year most of us typically review the preceding year, do some soul searching and evaluating of our efforts, and set some goals for the year ahead. It is a quilt blogging tradition to review your quilty accomplishments of the past year, and write about it in your last blog post of the year. I used to make some lofty quilting resolutions, but I know myself well enough now to know that the best I can hope for is fewer new projects started and more UFO's completed!
This year I finished 6 quilts that were on my 2014 UFO list (you can see the list posted to the right of my blog).

1) Storm at Sea is a wallhanging I finished in June. It was made from a John Flynn laser cut kit that I purchased in Paducah many years ago. The piecing was a dream, even though the pieces were very tiny. You can see the machine quilting better in this post.









2)  Sunflower mystery was a large lap quilt finished in October. It was a UFO from 2007 so I was delighted that it was finally a finished project. I used this UFO to try a new (to me) circular quilting design, which you can see in this post.

3) Civil War Sampler
These blocks were started in 2011 as a weekly project on Barbara Brackman's blog. You can read more about it and see the great backing I made for it here. All of the fabrics were civil war reproductions. I almost abandoned the project early on (read about the reason why here) but persevered and am soooooo happy that I did. I love this quilt and feel proud of the accumulated effort that produced this finish! Cathy quilted it for me and did a beautiful job!

4) Plaid Beauty
This quilt was started in a workshop with Bonnie Hunter in 2010 and was finished in July this year! You can read more about it here.
This is another quilt that I am very proud of and I machine quilted it with straight lines in the middle and a feather in the border. I was going to give it as a gift, but find I am not able to part with it just yet!

5) Fandango and Friends - Scrappy Hexagons
This quilt was 4 years in the making, and was completed in August. I enjoyed machine quilting it with free motion curvy lines. You can read more about that here.










6) Countdown to Christmas This quilt was a sew along with Temecula quilts last December. It became a finished quilt in April.
You can see the quilting design here.








I enjoyed participating in the Lovely Year of Finishes in 2014 and was delighted to finish half of my list. Some of the finishes took 2 months of goal setting, but it worked out fine. The deadline and accountability does help to motivate me to finish projects.
These were my other non-UFO finishes this year, listed in order of their size:  Mini Hearts, Civil War Kisses, Cascadia, spring tablerunner, Market Day, Superpowers, autumn HSTs, Nabby's Dowry, a flannel baby quilt, Not Just Any Rail Fence, Journey of a Quilter, Civil War BOM, and Angel Solstice. (You can see all of these finished quilts here.) Wow... that's 13 more finished quilts!! Of these finished quilts, I machine quilted 10, I hand quilted 1, and the 2 largest projects were long arm quilted by fellow blogger Cathy.
So that's a total of 19 quilts completed in 2014. 
And that is the benefit of a year end summary post - you can see what you have accomplished, and all of a sudden the lengthy UFO list doesn't seem so discouraging!

Happy New Year

I am wishing you many blessings in 2015, lots of fun quilting adventures with good friends, and an abundance of time to spend stitching! Thanks for visiting my blog this year and contributing your positive energy, ideas and encouragement!