A Fresh Start

New Year's is not a holiday we celebrate particularly, but I look forward to it because it's a chance to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. Even so, I don't typically make New Year's Resolutions because I never keep them. Oh, I think about the same things everyone else thinks about--exercising more, dieting, being kinder to my fellow man; but I know myself pretty well, and I'm as likely as not to let those things fall by the wayside pretty quickly. (Well, maybe except for the last one.)

 

There are a few things in the quilting studio I really want to accomplish this year. The first might be to start blogging again. It's been a very long time since I blogged. I didn't quilt hardly at all after the beginning of summer last year (although I knitted like a possessed woman); and generally if I don't quilt, I don't blog. I contemplated whether I should delete my blog, but I am loathe to do it after writing it for seven years. I also realized how much I missed reading the quilting blogs, hearing from a few favorite bloggers occasionally, and being part of online challenges. Most of the time it's hard to get my quilting friends locally to work together on a project, and that is something I especially enjoy. I can do that with quilting bloggers online. So I'm having another go at blogging. If I could post once a week, I'd feel like a Resolution had been met.

 

Another thing I'd like to do this year is make six Quilts of Valor, beginning this month, and making another every other month. I subscribe to Fons and Porter "Love of Quilting" magazine, which prints six issues a year, and there's a QOV in every issue (which I may or may not use). As a veteran, I appreciate very much that they do this; and it's something I'd like to be part of. I've started on the first one already--a very quick and simple quilt with a large center panel. Photos to follow.

 

I'd like to do the Rainbow Scrap Challenge again this year (although I can't think why exactly since I haven't finished the last two!). I like the quilt that Angela (I think that's her name) has devised this year, a column quilt, which I think will be fun to work on.

 

Of course there's the perpetual Resolution to finish more UFOs, and I have an abundance of those (don't we all?). And I would very much like to have the discipline to limit the number of quilts in progress so as to actually get things finished. That's the hardest thing for me. We'll see where it all goes.

 

Happy New Year to all!