End of the Year Review: 2020 Quilting Ambitions

Happy New Year!  When we went to bed early this morning, we could see the ice forming on the trees.  But when we woke up this morning, this is what we saw. 

It's still snowing, though it has slowed down some. I'll definitely take a snow storm over an ice storm any time.   

I stitched up to just a few minutes before midnight last night in hopes of hitting some key metrics for the year.  I didn't get any more finishes, but I'll start 2021 on a good foot. Before moving on with my 2021 ambitions, I should look at what did and didn't work with my 2020 ambitions.    

2020 Ambition #1: Finish 12 Quilts

I played along with Quilting Gail's PHD in 2020 to keep me focused on this goal.

 Here's my completed tracking sheet.  

There were 7 finishes in 2020, the most recent happened on 12/30/2020. Talk about cutting it close!  I didn't meet my goal of 12 quilts, but finishing 7 is a personal best I've only managed three other times (2010, 2011 and 2017).  

Finished quilts includes Twinkle Stars (started in 2015), Winter Quilt Along (2019), Mosaic Mystery (2019), Storm at Sea (2019), 2019 Christmas Mystery (2019), Frolic (2019) and Daisy Chain Mystery (2019).  

What did I learn from the PHD challenge last year?  That focusing on fewer projects, 2 or 3, rather than my normal 5 or 6 helps push more projects to the finished column. 2020's word was "Finish".  This year's word is going to be "Focus". 

The other "ah ha" moment from last year was realizing that there is something to momentum when completing a project.  If you look at the completed list, 6 of the quilts were started in 2019. Some of those were on my 2020 PHD list, but several weren't. It's just easier to keep working on a recent project. So my three 2020 starts are on my 2021 PHD list right at the top. 

The other part of the finishing quilts ambition was to limit new starts.  I allowed my self three new starts, two beloved mystery quilt alongs and one other project if something caught my eye.  I met that goal, with Unity, Morewood Mystery and Grassy Creek the only starts for 2020.  

2020 Ambition #2: Host 15 Minutes to Stitch, Work in 15 minutes of stitching time 85% of the days in 2020   

There were 51, 15 Minute to Stitch linky parties in 2020.  I missed posting one linky party the first week of work from home back in March. It was just such a stressful week and I hadn't wrapped my head around the implications and realities of the pandemic as yet. I couldn't even convince myself to start up my personal computer (A large part may have been just dealing with the stress of spending so much time on my work computer with all the virtual meetings that week).  Almost 10 months later we all have our fingers crossed that the vaccine will bring an end to all the pandemic restrictions and stress.

I managed to fit in at least 15 minutes of stitching time 324 days out of 366 (remember 2020 was a leap year), for a success rate of 88.5%.  My ambition for stitching time for many years was 90%, but that's really, really hard to meet if you have job that requires travel (I had two business trips early in the year) and a job where unexpected projects added to an already full plate requires long work days (which is what happened in December).  I still finished seven quilts last year.  So while it's important to get into the sewing room regularly, it's also important to focus on just a few things at at time.  

From a quilting perspective, 2020 was a really good year.  Maybe in part because other parts of 2020 weren't so great. Fingers crossed that 2021 is much kinder, gentler and much less anxiety filled than 2020.