Quilting

I’m joining up with Yvonne@Quilting Jetgirl’s 2016 Mid Year Review. Things have changed A LOT since I wrote my 2016 Goals for Quilting and Blogging post back in December. The major thing that has happened is being diagnosed with bursitis and arthritis in both of my shoulders. I am having to be more selective about the projects I’m involved with, so I have opted out of several projects that I signed up for in December 2015 including the Aurora Star BOM, the Tribal Block Club, and the Fancy Forest BOM hosted by my local quilt store, ThreadBear. The good news is that I have the PDF files and/or patterns and can work on these down road if I choose.

I am keeping up with my online quilting bee commitments but needed to ask for help from a good quilty friend with a complicated paper-piecing block. I’m excited about being Queen Bee in August for both of my online quilting bees, Stash Bee and The Bee Hive. I have blogged about my bee block choice, the Quatrefoil block in My Turn to be Queen Bee.

I completed both of my mini mini swaps this year  and have done a good job not getting sucked into all the Instagram swaps though I have to say the Polaroid block swaps really tempted me.

I did attend both QuiltCon 2016  in Pasadena, California, and Glamp Stitchalot in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I learned so much at both of these events and met so many wonderful quilty friends. When I received the program ahead of time for Glamp Stitchalot and saw that three of the classes were on paper-piecing, I decide to finish the first paper-piecing project I ever attempted which was a small bird-in-a-birdhouse. It made me a little more comfortable with the paper-piecing classes though I am still not what I would call proficient with this piecing technique.

Back in December, I knew that I wanted to sew a quilt for my full-size bed and had planned to sew a simple patchwork quilt using 5″ squares from her Carolyn Friedlander’s Doe collection. But my vision for a quilt for my bed changed on Christmas Day when I opened a present from my best friend that had two one-yard cuts of fabric from Emma Jean Jansen’s Terra Australis collection and a $50 gift certificate to ThreadBear that I used to buy some of the coordinating prints. I fell in love with this fabric and decided to create a 25-block sampler quilt using fabric from this collection with 12 1/2″ unfinished blocks. I have now completed all 25 blocks for my Terra Australis quilt and have added sashing.

I am in the process of adding outer borders to increase the size to fit my full-size bed. I hope to take this to Michael at ThreadBear to work his longarm-quilting magic the second week of August.

One other project I mentioned wanting to do when I set my 2016 goals was to sew a Midnight Stars quilt. I was going to use two Black Tie Affair layer cakes but have decided instead to make it using Sarah Watts’ Honeymoon fabric as a birthday gift for my best friend. I’m excited to work on a project with such big half-square triangles and hope it will go together fairly quickly. See my 2016 Quarter 3 Finish-Along Goals for a link to the pattern and a picture of the fabric I’ll be using.

For the time being, I have decided to not quilt anything myself larger than a baby quilt and am not going to worry about increasing my free-motion quilting skills at this time. So the log cabin blocks from my Instagram swap from 2015 will continue to be a UFO. I’m also not worrying about some other 2015 UFOs like my Midnight Mystery quilt (though I may use the Flying Geese in another project).

Blogging

I am keeping up with my commitment to write at least four posts per month. Blogging is something I really enjoy though I need to work on being more timely in responding to comments.

I still have not made much headway with my quilt photography. It is the aspect of quilting/blogging that I enjoy the least, but I suspect I would like it more if I put more time and energy into planning better quilt photography locations with good outdoor light.

I participated in the 2016 Paintbrush Studio New Block Blog Hop in March and plan to participate in the 2016 Cloud 9 New Block Blog Hop September 12-14, 2016. I think the block I have designed will work perfectly with this gorgeous Berry Harvest bundle.

My blog definitely needs some clean-up and reorganization. I’d like to add a Tutorials tab and delete a lot of the tags that I used initially when I first started blogging.

The Last Five Months of 2016

Many other bloggers have talked about the need to increase self-care and have more balance in their lives, and I completely relate. Being consistent with PT exercises, walking and stretching more, and eating more nutritious meals needs to be a priority in the last five months of this year.

Linking up to Quilting Jetgirl’s 2016 Mid Year Review.