2008 Goals

This year, in a effort to declutter my life and feel more productive, I am setting goals. I've decided to share my craft-related goals.

• Make 50 quilt tops for Project Linus.
• Subgoal: 3 quilt tops will be appliqued.
• Finish 50 blankets for Project Linus - Note: I'm tracking tops and finished blankets separately because sometimes I finish what someone else started and vice versa.
• Subgoal: 4 finished blankets will be afghans
• Make 48 hats for charity
• Reduce number of UFOs by 50%

To support the above goals, I've set a goal to sew for at least a few minutes at least 3 or 4 days a week. It's easy for me to go a couple of weeks without touching a sewing machine or rotary cutter. I'm making notes on a pocket calendar to track my progress.

I have to inventory my UFOs and I've set a milestone of Jan. 14 to complete that task.

This little fleece blanket is my first finished Project Linus blanket for 2008. The edge finish is the faux braided edge we learned at our Project Linus Make a Difference Day gathering last October. I brought the fleece home from our Make a Difference Day event and it was time to do this quick project and reduce the clutter in my sewing area by that 2 foot square piece of fleece.

Do you remember this picture of my scrap basket that I shared in July 2006? I started the "Mile-A-Minute" quilt pattern by Carol A. Coski (American Quilter magazine, Winter 2000), but the effort quickly became a UFO. I pulled out the pieces last week and started sewing. With pressing and cutting, I think it's more like a mile-an-hour than a mile-a-minute.

I had to pull out the scrap basket and cut more strips today and the scrap basket is still full. Dare I confess that I have a goal to make 10 tops out of this scrap basket this year? I need to find something faster than mile-a-minute.

Here's a couple of pictures from last Friday when I was just getting restarted on stitching these. I'm using Coski's Mile-A-Minute pattern as a guide, but I'm not following directions rigorously. Sort of doing my own thing, as usual.

As I make the blocks larger and larger, I keep making more and more small pieces. I'm creating the small pieces faster than I'm finishing blocks, so I've started to sew 2 pieced units together, like this piece on the left.

To show a little progress after 5 mornings of working on these blocks for an hour or so, this is what my little sewing machine looks like right now. I do a lot of my piecing on this machine. It's an old Montgomery Wards machine that only straight stitches and it has a long shuttle bobbin.