A Lovely Year of Finishes: January 2015

I often lose too much of the month with these things by dithering until the last second before deciding what my goal will be, and by then I’ve lost a week of time I could have spent sewing! But I only really have one big goal this month, and that’s to finish my 42 Hashtag baby quilt that my sister commissioned for a co-worker friend who is having a baby. If you follow me on Instagram (@clumsychord), you’ll have probably hit your tolerance level for how many times you want to see the unfinished bits of this quilt…

but here is a little more. To be honest, in the last couple days I did get the entire quilt top pieced, but I’m very reluctant to show it because I want to just show the finished piece, when I finally get it there, instead of spoiling it by showing the whole thing now!

The mama of the baby this is intended for doesn’t know if she is having a boy or a girl, so she did the nursery mostly in lime greens and browns. So my sister asked for that and then I dug around in my solids stash for a good brown (with enough quantity – I don’t tend to stash a lot of 2 yard cuts of solid fabric in anything but black or white!) and fished around in my green scraps for fabrics large enough to cut 5-inch charms. I wanted to get a good blend of greens, leaning as much toward lime as possible (though I think I tended to hit grellow more – you know, that yellow-green colour that’s kind of like chartreuse I suppose), and then I wanted also to add in a little bit of sky blue and some yellow, just to make sure there was a bit of depth and interest.

Piecing all these hashtag blocks together, I noticed that I’ve got a metric ton of dot and… dot-adjacent fabrics. So very many dots!

Anyway, the goal for this month is just to get this little thing finished. All that’s left at this point is basting, quilting, and binding. And it’s a pretty small quilt, so it shouldn’t take too long. As always, it’s the basting that’s holding me up. I do love to avoid that particular nightmare as long as possible… but needs must. So my next day off work, that’s going to be my goal – basting. And then after that I think I’ll fly through it. I’ve got a fairly simple plan for the quilting (since my good machine is still in the shop and I don’t want to rely on having it back soon enough to use) so once I get it going, it should be a pretty quick project. And then binding and it’ll be done!

I’m really loving this quilt. I mean, usually I have a half dozen things to point out and say that I’d change this or I’d change that, but assuming all goes well, this one should just be a straight up pat-myself-on-the-back quilt. I need to get it done because I’m just actually kind of excited to show it to everyone!

Linking up with A Lovely Year of Finishes, WIP Wednesday at The Needle and Thread Network, WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced, and Let’s Bee Social at Sew Fresh Quilts.