Vintage Christmas - January Blocks

This year our group that meets at the Front Porch Quilt Shoppe is doing Lori Holt's Vintage Christmas blocks.  Some people are doing the Vintage Christmas quilt that is pictured on the cover of the book, which involves making 6-inch squares for all 42 blocks in the book.  Some are doing the Christmas Eve quilt, which uses 25 of the blocks done in the 12-inch size.  Probably some people will do some of the other quilts featured in the book.  I probably won't be alone in doing something completely different with the blocks.  At least one other person mentioned that they were going to do something different.

What I really need, when it comes to Christmas quilts, is a Christmas wall hanging.  Everything featured in the book was either too big, or too small, for what I was wanting.  I decided to use blocks from the book and make up my own wall hanging size quilt.  It will feature a 12-inch block in the center, surrounded by sashing, 6-inch blocks, more sashing, 3-inch blocks (made from an element of one of the 6-inch blocks in the book), and an outer border.

For the class, we were assigned 5 blocks for this month, if we were doing the cover quilt.  Of those blocks, I only wanted to use 2 of them in my quilt, so that's all I made.  On the left is the Christmas Candles blocks and on the right is the Glisten block, both in the 6-inch size.  Lots of tiny pieces here.  That's not my favorite thing to do, but I'm willing to do it for a quilt that I want to have.  Maybe I won't go crazy before the year is over and the project is finished!

2018 Goals In Review

At the beginning of 2018 I set some goals for myself:

1. Finish the year with fewer unquilted quilt tops than I started the year with
2. If I start new projects, use fabrics that I already have on hand.
3. If I buy new fabric, it should be to finish an existing project or complete a project I've previously designed.

So, how did that work out?  Well . . . not so good actually. 

I did accomplish the first one.  I did, in fact, end the year with fewer unquilted quilt tops than I started with.  Of the 19 unquilted tops I started with, I got 7 quilted.  I then created 4 new quilt tops that haven't been quilted, although one is at the quilt shop to be quilted, so I'm not sure that one should count against me.  But that is still a net improvement, so I win that one.

On goal number 2, I was doing pretty good there until I got to July.  The two fabric bargello quilt wasn't really something I designed, but it was something I had been wanting to make for quite a while and the quilt shop finally got in some ombre fabric that I could use.  I couldn't pass that up.  Then I found out that my step-daughter was expecting her first baby, and of course I had to buy fabric to make a quilt for her that would match what she wanted for the nursery.  These seemed justifiable, because one was unforeseen circumstances (new baby) and the other almost meshed with goal #3.  However, in November I just gave up.  There were quilts that I wanted to make that I needed to buy new fabric for, so I just did it.

On goal number 3, I was doing pretty good until the quilt shop had a low bolt sale in August.  Her supplier brought in boxes and boxes of "low" yardage bolts, (I put that in quotation marks because I don't really consider 8 yards that low and most of them had that much) and anything that didn't sell was going to be returned.  It was $6.99 per yard, which is GREAT for quilt shop fabric, so I couldn't pass that up just because of New Year's Resolution (aka quilting goal), right?

So for 2019 my quilting goals are to have fun and enjoy quilting.  My only resolution or limitation that I'm adding is that I want to avoiding making quilts that I don't really want to make.  I made two quilts in 2018 that I didn't really like.  I hope to avoid that this year.  Wish me luck!

Sisters Ten Star Quilt

I finished my re-imagined Sisters Ten Sampler quilt top.  Once I saw the finished quilt tops of my fellow guild mates, I realized that I liked the 9-inch square version better than the 12-inch square version.  I also liked the quilts that had a dark background fabric better than the ones with a light background fabric.  And finally, I liked the background to have a slight pattern in it instead of being a total solid.

I saw this black constellation fabric at the quilt shop and thought it would make a great background for this type of quilt.  It gave me the idea of making all the squares be star blocks instead of using the blocks in the original pattern.  The only block that I reused from the original pattern was the Ohio Star block.  I'm really much happier with how this one turned out, at least at this stage in the process.  Hopefully I'll like my original quilt better once it is quilted.