I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am that we’re already through the first quarter of 2025, but I’m overall I’m pleased with how things are going quilting-wise. Below are the two recap posts I’ve written this quarter that sum up the progress I’ve made on the three Block of the Month programs I’m participating in as well as SAHRR 2025:

• February 2025 Recap
• March 2025 Recap

What’s up for Quarter 2

The biggest thing going on in my quilting world is that in February I treated myself to a new sewing machine: a Janome TravelMate 50. I love that it is portable but also a powerful machine. I’ve had a Juki machine for a number of years that has never been a good fit for me, even though many of the quilters I follow swear by their Juki machines. It’s too heavy for me, and I really don’t like that the bobbin is hidden. So I’ve been sewing on two Brother sewing machines–one for piecing and the other for binding/walking foot quilting. Well, a couple months ago, I was trying to do some simple quilting, and the stitch length was stuck at a really tiny stitch length, and it looked terrible. So I ended up ripping out the quilting and the hand-quilted my Project Quilting 16.4: The Birthstone Challenge. A few days later I drove to Santa Fe for a quilt guild meeting, and after the meeting, I stopped by the Santa Fe Sewing Center and bought my new sewing machine which included a visible bobbin and three classes on learning to use my Janome TravelMate 50. A couple weeks ago I took that last class which focused on using the walking foot and free motion quilting with the darning foot.

Since that class, I’ve been practicing some basic free motion quilting (FMQ). I’m not looking to quilt large projects due to too much wear and tear on my shoulders, but I’d like to quilt some baby quilts including the one I’m currently working on for Stacey Lee’s Quilt Donation Drive 2025. I particularly like doing a loopy meander. I just got a copy of Lori Kennedy’s Free Motion Quilting 1-2-3, and I’ve been having fun with her Flower Power quilting motif. She describes it as the easiest motif every quilter should learn and gives a pictorial tutorial on her website here.

I’ve also been working more with EQ8, the most current version of Electric Quilt, which is a software for quilt designing. I drafted the log cabin triangle template for the birthstone challenge in EQ8, and recently learned how to create a PDF of quilt blocks created in EQ8. The last part of March I gave a paper-piecing demo to my quilt guild and shared the template with them. I demonstrated with a rainbow version of this 6″ block:

Below is a photo I took of the template. I would be happy to email a copy to anyone who wants one. If I’ve corresponded with you via email, I don’t need your address unless you want to me to send it to a different email.

To make it easier, strips can be pre-cut. A1 (2.5″ square, if fussy cut, the motif needs to be less than the size of a quarter), A2 1.5″ x 3.5″, A3 1.5″ x 4″, A4 1.5″ x 5″, A5 1.5″ x 6″, A6 1.5″ x 6.5″, and A7 1.5″ x 8″. Triangles for A8 and A9 can be be cut diagonally from a 4.5″ x 8″ rectangle.

The last thing I have going on is participating in Alison Glass’ Color Camp 2025. She is hands-down my fabric fabric designer, and I have a decent amount of her fabric in my stash. I gravitate toward the saturated colors that are predominant in her fabric, but I’ve been learning more about how lighter values and darker values can give more interest to our projects. This past week, we had the assignment to paint our own color wheel with the inner circle being the hue, the middle circle the tint (the hue color lightened with white), and the outer circle the tone (the hue color darkened with grey). Below is a photo of my rather bottom-heavy color wheel. Not surprisingly, it’s not as pretty as the one that Alison demo’ed 🙂

Linking up to #2025QuiltingQ1CheckIn.