2020 in Quilts and more

It’s time for my annual round up of quilts made in the last year. And what a year! Not for the quilts, as there has been so few against my usual tally, but for all the changes and trauma that we have had to watch or participate in. It’s strange to think that last New Year’s Eve we had absolutely no idea what was headed our way…

This has been quite a quiet year for me quiltwise.  I managed to fill out this 9 square mosiac only by adding in 3 mini quilts. Plus out of the others half are just single bed size! And out of the 3 remaining 2 were actually made in 2019 but couldn’t be shown until 2020 due to being magazine commissions.

This lack of productivity was largely due to working on my next non-quilting book and all the extra work I’ve been doing with The Thread House, such as our BOM Club and Virtual Retreats. Out of the 9 quilts above all but 4 have gone on to new homes (either sold, raffled for charity or donated to charities) and even one of these remaining quilts will be gifted in the New Year.

But I did make A LOT of small items including all these tendril and bird pouches! Some have both tendrils and birds! Out of all of these I have kept both the new Birdy Pouches (for kit samples) and just one of the the Tendrils Pouches (far right, centre row).

And then there are all these Rice Pouches and Project Bags!  Again I either sold, raffled or gifted most of these. The Project Bag pattern is by Karen Lewis and is available here and the Rice Pouch pattern is by Karen Stevens and is available here.

Over Christmas I have been working away on some long running WIP like my Splendid Sampler 2 quilt.  I started this back in 2018 when the book came out and the sewalong started. I kept up for quite a while and managed to make half the blocks. I had designed one of the blocks and was part of a Facebook group for the Splendid Sampler designers. I really enjoyed joining in with the other designers and making their blocks. You can read about my block and the book here.

I lost momentum with this project around a year ago and decided recently that instead of struggling on to make the other 51 blocks I would just use the 49 I had but frame them with the remaining fabric I had put aside. I then sashed them all with an Ecru Solid to finish the top. I think this is going to be a really special quilt when finished as so many of these 6″ blocks are little works of art. This quilt is already promised to my good pal Ali for her 50th birthday (which was 18 months ago!).

My plan is to have a small pile of finished quilt tops ready for my Handi Quilter Moxie Long Arm which will be arriving in January. So I then got out my mahoosive pile of saved orphan blocks and class samples and started to divide them up into possible tops.  These improv house blocks were the easiest to fit together so I started here.  This was a workshop I taught a lot back at myBearpaw and I usually ended up with 2 blocks from each class. Plus I included are a couple of failed experiments that seemed to work well too.

That’s 3 tops in the pile and I’m on to the next one already! It feels great to be finally getting some of these projects finished and a good place to be as we head into 2021.

Here’s to a much brighter year to come and a Happy New Year to you all!