Happy New Year!

As we enter the week of 2013, I have to wonder how many of you actually make New Year's Quilting Resolutions and how many of those will actually become reality? Did anyone make a resolution to make more quilts, or to at least make modern quilts? Did you promise yourself that you wouldn't buy any more fabric or supplies until you use of at least some of what you already own? Did you decide if you would finish up those UFO's from years past before starting new projects?

I wish I could say that all of the above was true for me. I would love to finish up all my old, incomplete quilting projects before starting new ones, but, life events get in the way of that and I know that I will need to start some unplanned project due to the early birth of a friends baby, or some technique that catches my eye that I want to try myself. And the reality is that I have so many UFOs and unquilted tops that it would take me most of 2013 to finish these up before I could make anything new. Okay, so maybe I should just strive to finish up one UFO per month and at the end of the year, I'd be down 12 UFOs. That sounds like a reasonable goal to try and reach.

I did promise myself I would make more charity quilts this year than I have in the past two years. This is a dual purpose promise. 

1) It will help me reduce my stash to a more manageable level.
2) It will help me reach my charitable giving goal for the year in the textile department. I have been doing a litle research on the some of the local charities that I could select as recipients and was surprised that so many of them exist today. I also promised myself to donate some of my fabric stash to organizations or other persons that will make quilts for charity. I've even agreed to teach a quilting workshop to the local girl scout troop in March. If I can inspire even one little girl to love the needle half as much as I do, then I will be a happy camper. If nothing else, they will at least earn their sewing badges that month!

One other thing I have set a goal to do is to start blogging on a regular basis and share my thoughts and ideas with others. This is a new world to me and would you laugh at me if I told you I just started to learn how to 'twitter' this past weekend? My tweets were not quilting related, but it was an attempt to keep track of the scores at a distant college gymnastics meet in which my favorite gymnast was competing.

Back in the quilting world, I am going to try and make more original design quilts and far fewer commercial or traditional patterns. There are hundreds of ideas rolling around in this head of mine. Far too few of them become actual finished projects. My best works so far have been those quilts that I made from my own ideas and this will be the primary focus of my stitching growth for 2013.

Hanging by a thread--Diane