The other night, I decided I was tired of not-sewing. That’s not exactly the same as wanting to sew again, but I wanted to want it. So I decided to push myself into the glorified closet that is my sewing room and fake it ’til I felt it.

Lo and behold, I finished up the blocks for a baby quilt, and the next day, I got the top put together. It was nice to feel that satisfaction again, of progress and seeing something come together the way I imagined it.

I need to figure out the back, and practice the quilting I want to do to make sure it will actually work, but I should be able to finish this one relatively soon. An April finish! Yes! It will happen!

When that’s done, I’m going to dig into the unfinished pile and hopefully make substantial progress on my mom’s Nicey Jane quilts. Wish me luck, and hopefully it’ll be less than a month before I’m back here again.

This one started with the fabrics. Specifically, some of my long-hoarded, out-of-print Heather Ross fabrics, which were desperately waiting for just the right little boy. Almost directly from one of the Heather Ross prints, I was in love with the combination of aqua/sky, navy blue, and a reddish orange – no brown. Boyish without being TRUCKS AND PIRATES AND ALIENS, and appropriately preppy for the son of a pair of Manhattan lawyers.

The only question was – what to do with it all? I hit up my Pinterest boards, looking for something that would be quick and relatively simple, but not too boring. The one that jumped out at me was the Reunion Quilt from That girl… That quilt. So lovely! Simple patchwork made just a bit more interesting with some hourglass blocks thrown in.

Needless to say, this came together quickly, and I am so, so happy with how all of the fabrics work together. The solids in the half-square triangle and hourglass blocks, in case you’re wondering, are Kona Aqua, Tangerine, and Nightfall, with Snow.

The back is a polka dot I bought ages ago at Joann’s, as though it were always meant for this project. To bring it up to size, I added some more Nightfall and Tangerine (not easy colors to photograph, especially indoors in the winter!), as well as the light blue Lizzy House XO print.

I didn’t realize until I went back to link to the inspiration quilt how close to exactly the same quilting I did on mine. Whoops! I started out quilting either side of the horizontal seams, and then went back and quilted diagonally, every third block. So the whole thing has stayed nice and soft and minimally quilted, but I like that some of the squares have a diagonal or an X through them.

The binding is even more hoarded Heather Ross – a stripe from Lightning Bugs and Other Mysteries that I randomly scored a few years ago at my first Boston Modern Quilt Guild meeting.

So, off this quilt has flown to New York, to hopefully be loved and used and abused by Lucy‘s new little brother, James. Hope you love it, sweet boy! (And your mama, too.)

But then we had to come home early since, as you may have heard, we here in Massachusetts got a bit of snow this weekend.

So, plenty of housebound time to hang out and finish up. How cute is this little raccoon?!

Can’t wait to find out what next month holds!

Now, since the hurricane-force winds have died down, it’s time to get back into my sewing room and finish up some baby quilts!

So, on to February’s priority list! This will be a little challenging, since I’m going to be away for a week, plus the kids have school vacation for a week. But fingers crossed that I’ll get it done!

1. Baby boom quilt #2, a preppy bit of patchwork. The top is complete, I just need to figure out a back and finish it up.

2. Baby boom quilt #3, which I’m rather excited about. I have discovered my new favorite Kona Solid color: Nightfall. Oh, this photo doesn’t even do it justice, it is the most gorgeous twilight shade of navy blue. There’s going to be a lot of it, with a handful of yellows. I’m kind of excited for this design, I hope it turns out as pretty as it looks in my head.

3. Keep up with the Woodland Sampler. Can’t wait to fill in the one blue frame! I think this one will travel with me.

But dangit, I couldn’t resist. I saw people tweeting about the Woodland Sampler and thought it would be a fun project, so I joined up. But then I figured I might want to, you know, try cross-stitching something before I started in on a year-long project. I came upon this pattern and decided to give it a go. If nothing else, at least I could feel good that the money was going to a good cause.

Well, I loved it. I love how satisfyingly precise and even those little stitches are. I love how easy it is, how it requires virtually no special skill or accuracy other than counting correctly (which, OK, is sometimes easier said than done). I love the fun patterns that are available now, especially the pixel people by weelittlestitches on Etsy. I picked up a few of those patterns when they were on sale and have been working them on and off when I get a chance.

So, now the Woodland Sampler is underway. When I signed up, I got a PDF pattern with all of the thread colors listed, as well as the layout for the frames. Then, each month I get a new pattern to fill in one of the frames. January’s was this sweet little deer couple. Cute, right?

The frames are finally complete and ready for the next months’ designs. It took longer than I imagined it would to finish all of those boxes, but again, it certainly wasn’t difficult. Just something to do while watching TV.

What will I do with this when it’s done? I haven’t got the faintest idea. And for now, I don’t really care. It’s just a fun project to work on and carry around with me.

Here’s the first, for sweet Lincoln born in mid-December, a first baby for one of the groomsmen from our wedding. When I started to plan it, before he was born, I had to go gender-neutral since they weren’t going to find out what they were having. But pale greens and yellows just aren’t my cup of tea. And I had this lovely stack of rainbow charms that I had gotten from a swap at Sewing Summit. I thought it would be fun to do a zig-zag rainbow. (Or are we not saying zig-zag anymore? Just chevron? Sounds fancier that way.)

I actually had to laugh to myself, because it reminded me of a conversation I once had with a couple of crafty friends. We were talking about sewing for babies, and especially about designing quilts for baby boys. And someone came up with the greatest question to determine how adventurous you could be with the colors: how heteronormative are the parents? I’m not talking about whether they’re straight or not. I just find that some people, as parents, tend towards the more traditionally gendered colors than others, regardless of whether the parents themselves are straight or otherwise. Anyways, knowing this particular couple, I didn’t think anyone would feel threatened by a little color.

And to me, this is actually a really gender-neutral rainbow. Leaving out the purple makes it a little less feminine, and the gray background feels kind of urban and modern to me (this family lives in Brooklyn). And then the binding choice would let me tip it in one direction or another – in this case, a deep blue Lizzy House print.

The quilting is fairly dense, which meant it took a lot longer than I thought it should for such a small quilt. It also, unfortunately, made it not want to lie flat any more. But in addition to looking really cool, it gives the quilt some amazing texture. When I got to the gray, I gradually spaced out the lines to soften it up.

And because I used different color threads in each section of the rainbow, you get a little echo of it on the back of the quilt. The back, for once, is a single piece of a single fabric! Can you believe it, a non-pieced back?! It was refreshing.

If I was going to make this quilt again, the one thing I’d do differently is to make sure the blues were a more consistent hue/value. The fabrics I got in the swap were pretty varied, and some of them were a little too light and/or green-ish, so there isn’t as clear a contrast as I would have liked between the green and the blue. Regardless, though, I am happy with how this quilt turned out, and I hope it gets plenty of use in its new home!

I admit to being a little skeptical of the purple-and-green color scheme she had chosen, but man did it turn out beautifully. The purples were a really gorgeous plum color, and the greens were light and springy. Throw in some silver (gray) accents and wedding whites, and you’ve got yourself a quilt.

I’m really happy with how these colors turned out, and I have some crowdsourcing to thank. I brought the fabrics to Sewing Summit (and added some while I was there), and had plenty of awesome people on hand to help me edit down the piles so they all played nicely together. I brought the completed blocks to a Boston Modern Quilt Guild meeting and had easily half a dozen people moving them here and there so the layout worked.

I had the back finished a few weeks ago, but saved the basting for last weekend’s BMQG meeting. Why? Because our meeting was in a gym with lots of open floor space! So much nicer than having to disassemble my dining room and yell at the dog to stay off the fabric. In case you’re wondering, that beautiful purple solid on the back is Kona Berry. Perfect fit for this quilt.

I didn’t want to quilt it too densely, because I wanted it to stay nice and soft. So I just did a really big, open, loopy meander all over. Not only did it turn out as I had hoped, but the whole thing (measuring about 65×75″) was done in a single sitting at my sewing machine. Yay for fast!

I considered a deep plum for the binding, but ultimately chose the subtler gray, since there was already plenty of purple on the back. And really, are Flea Market Fancy seeds ever a bad choice? Nope. Never. As a funny aside, I (again) crowdsourced the binding choice, totally forgetting that my sister is on Instagram. Thankfully, she “liked” the picture and commented that it was “one of her favorites.” I had to laugh, since I had just returned from the post office, shipping the very same quilt to her in Chicago. Hope she wasn’t just being nice!

And hey! It’s my first finish of the year, a goal accomplished from my list of January priorities, AND it counts towards the BMQG WIP challenge! A triple win for me!

P.S. You’ll forgive me if some of the quilt photos are a touch on the blurry side. I was testing out a new photographer. For being five years old, I’d say he did a pretty good job!

Instead of a year’s worth of goals, I’m going to try something new (to me) this year. I’m going to set some priorities or goals at the beginning of each month. Hopefully that will help me be realistic, as well as on-track and prioritized. Or, you know, not at all. Remains to be seen.

So, here are my three goals for January:

1. Finish my sister’s wedding quilt. I was making good progress on it, and then WHAMMO, December totally escaped me in a blur of teacher gifts and a complete lack of plans for school vacation. But now I’ve got the back made, and plenty of batting. Time to baste, quilt, and bind this sucker. Should be do-able.

2. Finish the first of three baby quilts that need to get done ASAP. You know how these things come in waves, right? All was quiet on the baby front for a while, but now I’ve got three new babies being born to close friends within a couple of months. The recipient for this one, in fact, was born almost a month ago. Oops. Gotta get on that.

3. Catch up with my Woodland Sampler cross-stitch, from the Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery. What’s that? Oh, yeah. I’m an idiot and picked up a new craft to completely distract me from everything else I should be doing. But dang, I’m enamored of cross-stitch right now. It’s a really straightforward skill, without being so easy it’s boring. Those little even stitches are so neat and orderly. And the patterns are just so darn cute. What will I do with the finished product? No idea. But I like having a portable little project for when I get a few seconds to sit down. And I love that this is a year-long sampler project, so we get one little piece at a time. (And if you want to do it, the price goes up from $10 to $16.95 after this Friday the 11th, so sign up now!)

The goal for January is to finish up the outlines of all of the frames (I have about 3 of 13 done already), and complete the contents of the January frame.

I’ll be back soon, I hope, to report on some progress!

(Let’s just ignore the fact that I should have started making stuff way ahead of time, shall we?)

Anyways, a couple of ideas got scrapped (no matching jammies for my kids and their cousins), but here’s what I did make:

Lined drawstring bags for EIGHT teachers and administrators at my kids’ school (filled with cookies and salty caramel sauce, YUM).

Infinity scarves for family and friends, made out of deliciously light and soft Anna Maria Horner voile (which was on sale at Hawthorne Threads, yay!).

A giant (24×100″) voile scarf/wrap for my sister-in-law. She is traveling to India next month and mentioned wanting a big scarf that she could use to cover her head when necessary, and I thought voile would be perfect. I made it a single layer because I wanted it to stay really lightweight, but that meant a whole lot of hemming – not typically my strong suit.  But with tons of ironing, I accomplished my first mitered hem corners. I also did my first French seam, since the single-layer meant the seam would stay exposed.

And now, back to my ever-expanding to-do list. So many projects, so little time!

I will forever associate this quilt with How I Met Your Mother. Sometimes I like to listen to music when I sew, sometimes I stream a movie or TV show on my iPad. I have a few friends who adore this show, but I had actually never watched it. Since all but the current season are available on Netflix, it has become my go-to sewing entertainment, and this quilt has fit neatly into HIMYM-increments.

I had the pieces for the blocks set out in ready-to-chain-piece stacks, with seven blocks per stack. One stack? Two episodes.

Time to add sashing and put the blocks into rows? One episode per row.

Assemble the quilt top? Two rows plus sashing per episode, booyah!

I’m well into the second season, now, and plenty more to go on my ever-expanding to-do list. I wonder how long it’ll take me to catch up to real-time on this show?

What about you? Do you have a favorite playlist or show for when you’re sewing? Or are you content to just listen to the whirr of the machine?