Happy New Year



Happy New Year to all. Hard to believe another year has come and gone. The month of December went by in a flash because there was so much to be done to get ready for Christmas.

The weather was no help either. The northeast was hit with an ice storm Christmas week, and we were without power from Monday noon til about 7:00pm Christmas Eve. I was thankful to get it back then, and many others spent Christmas Day without power. We have a generator, which allowed us to have some essentials--heat, a few lights, frig, freezer, microwave and internet, but our activities were still quite limited. I spent many hours knitting contentedly. We had lots of down tree branches in the yard, but thankfully no damage to the house or to the garage.

It's also been extremely cold here in Maine, the coldest temperatures we've seen in years. We've had another foot of snow since the ice storm, and the last several days have been near zero. Tonight they are predicting a low of 10 below zero.

I finished part of Part 1 of Bonnie Hunter's Celtic Solstice mystery and never really got back to it. Hubby came home two weeks before Christmas and said that his team at work adopted a family to help out for Christmas, and did I have a quilt I could donate. Uh, no. The father was a disabled Marine Corps vet, and no one on the team was shopping for the father or grandmother, just the kids; so I took that as an opportunity to make a Quilt of Valor for this man, something I'd wanted to get involved in for a long time. 

I made this quilt from start to finish in 6 days. The center of the quilt is a pre-printed panel, so it was just a matter of piecing the star blocks and adding multiple rounds of borders. I spent a few days sewing the top, a day quilting it on the longarm, and a day finishing up the binding. I was so pleased with the way it turned out, and I plan to make some more Quilts of Valor. I have one more pre-printed panel for another quilt like this one, then I'll be using some other patterns. Fons and Porter puts a Quilt of Valor pattern in each issue of their Love of Quilting magazine, so I have plenty to choose from.

I quit making New Year's resolutions years ago because I never keep them, but there are a few things I'd like to do this year, along with making a few more QOVs. I'd like to finish up a few more quilts from the perpetual UFO list, make a few quilts from a list of quilts I've been wanting to make for years, make some miniature quilts, and get a little smarter with EQ7.

I'd also like to finish up ALL of my knitting UFOs. I promised myself when I started knitting that I wouldn't stash shop and have a bunch of knitting UFOs--hah! didn't happen. But I do LOVE it all. I added another list in the sidebar for my knitting projects, mostly for myself so I can keep track of what I've gotten done during the year.

Hope everyone has a happy, prosperous, and healthy new year!

Credit where credit is due: "American Valor" designed by Nancy Rink.