January 2025 PHD Report

Usually January feels so slothful, the days drag and the month feels like it goes on forever. Not this year.  I'm amazed to find we've reached the end of the first month of the year.  It will speed up from here, so 2025 is set to move fast it seems.  

With the end of the month, it's time report on my UFO progress and link up at P Designs USA for the January PHD Report.  First off, my report.  

One new start and no finishes. That's a pretty typical start to my year. At least the new start was planned for.  If I can keep it to the three that were planned and finish at least 4, my UFO list should go down.  I'm hoping to do much better than that, but I'm going to need to start focusing on finishing to make that happen.  

The new start is the 2025 SAHRR (Quilting Gail). 

Round two is finished. So far I've kept up with the prompts.  Hopefully that continues.  This quilt is for Grad Girl's roommate so I need to finish it before May. 

There has been progress on several of my other projects this month. 

 

Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter) is my Rainbow Scrap Project for 2025.  This month's color was pink. I'm not using pink, so the plan was to finish all the red blocks needed for the layout and then start on some purple blocks. I miscounted how many reds were needed, I still need 8 of the 3.5" squares. By the time I realized that, I'd moved on to purple.   I'm sure red will come up again later this year and I can finish those up.  I've wrapped up the purple blocks for now and moved on to blue which is this month's RSC color.  

My leaders and enders project for 2025 is the same as I was using for the last half of 2024, the Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter).  I added 10 of the blue 4 patches and another 10 of the yellow.  I checked my counts, there are still lots of 4 patches to make.  

The 2024 Guild BOM is now a finished quilt top.  I wasn't so sure about the dark gray, but it works.  There is no plan for this quilt, hopefully it will get finished this year.  But I have six other quilt tops in the closet to finish first.  

Most of January has been spent on block assembly for the Marble Mystery (Meadow Mist Designs).  Attaching the sashing is ongoing..  Hopefully this will be a finished quilt top by the end of February.  

Not as much progress on Old Town (Bonnie Hunter) as I would have hoped for.  Clues 1 and 3 are finished.  Clue 4 was finished after the end of the month and I'm more than half way done with clue 2.  I'm slowly but surely working through all the clues.  Hopefully I can finish clues 5 and 6 before the end of February.    

The 2025 Guild BOM is on track. Since I'm the owner of the program this year, I have to be a month ahead, I've not started on March yet, but January and February are completed.  

My project tracking sheet doesn't show much progress. 

But a finished quilt top and progress on five other projects isn't a bad start to 2025. February is a short month, but hopefully I can keep up the momentum.   

To Do List for the week of 02/04/2025

Starting paragraph

To Do List for 01/28/2025

1.  2025 SAHRR: Finish second border ✔

2.  2025 Guild BOM: Start March blocks ✔

3.  Marble Mystery: Finish making blocks ✔

4.  Old Town: Continue working on clues ✔

5.  Wild and Goosey: Continue making purple blocks ✔

6.  Summer Scrap Quilt: Continue as leaders and enders ✔

It was a good week on the productivity front. Even if I'm not hitting major milestones with most of these projects, it's nice to see progress happening.  

So what's the plan for this week? Pretty much the same as last week and the week before, a bit of progress on several projects.  

To Do List for 02/04/2025

1.  2025 SAHRR (Quilting Gail) Finish third border

The prompt for this week is "stars".  I'm going to do Friendship Stars and have gotten all the blue pieces cut for those.  I still need to cut the green pieces. Then it's going to take a lot of assembly. I may be taking this prompt down to the wire.  

2.  Guild BOM: Finish the March blocks

I've gotten started on cutting the fabrics, but I need to finish that and then get going on assembly.  

3.  Chocolate Marshmallow (Seabreeze Quilts): Find backing fabric

If I want more finishes, I need to get started on prepping some quilts to go out for quilting. The plan is to shop the stash and piece a back if necessary. 

4. Marble Mystery (Meadow Mist Designs):  Finish quilt assembly, start on borders.

The vertical sashing strips are almost finished. Then I'll need add the horizontal sashing.  This photo is the closest I've gotten to the true colors in the quilt.  The deep purple tends to look black in most of my photos.  I'm excited to get this one to a finished quilt top.  

5.  Old Town (Bonnie Hunter):  Continue working on clues

Clue 4 is finally finished and I've moved on to clue 5.  Clues 1, 3, and 4 are all complete.  Still lots of pieces to make for this project.  But I'm making progress.  

6.  Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter):  Finish purple and continue with blue blocks.  

The top block is purple the bottom is blue.  I sometimes have a hard time deciding what's blue, blue violet, or purple. Red violet is usually easier to weed out.  It doesn't help that my digital camera really struggles with purple, it often looks blue before color correction.  

7.  Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter): Continue as leaders and enders. 

I'm back to making blue 4 patches this week.  My pile of blocks is slowly growing.  

That's my list this week. It's ambitious, other than my two deadline projects, I'm just hoping for progress on everything else.  Linking up with the Quilt Schmilt for To Do Tuesday.  

A Bit of This and That

I wasn't ready for it to be February already.  We've already had a full weekend in this short month, so now it's almost over.  Well maybe not really, but it certainly feels that way.  It will certainly go fast that's for sure.  

The weather was nice this weekend, so I got out and enjoyed it.  So there wasn't as much time in my sewing room as typical. Still there was progress on a few things.  One of which is my version of Marble Mystery (Meadow Mist Designs).  

There's a lot of purple in this one and I like it. The plan is to get this to a finished quilt top before the end of the month.  

Since it's a new month, I need to pick a project for the Chookshed Challenge.  The goal is to get in more than 7 finishes this year. If I'm going to do that I need to start pulling out those finished quilt tops, piece backings and get them ready to go out for quilting.  I'm going to start with the my oldest finished quilt top, Chocolate Marshmallows. This was number 1 on my list for this year.  

This is one project I've not pulled potential fabrics for the backing, so I'll need to dive into the stash for that. With the SAHRR going on right now, I'm not sure I'll get it all the way out the door. But any progress is good.  

Linking up with Design Wall Monday, Patchwork & Quilts, and the February Chookshed Challenge post.  

Stitching Stuff: Week 5 of 2025

 

It was definitely one of those weeks.  I kept hearing noises in the ceiling over my sewing room, then this huge crash coming from the walk in attic.  You guessed it, we have squirrels in the attic.  My husband sealed up the attic about 5 years ago after our last infestation which required replacing a significant portion of the wiring over the dining room and entry way.  But they've apparently found new ways in. I did find someone who would trap and remove them, plus fix the places in the roof they've damaged.  I'm pretty sure the stress of dealing with that led to one day of a full out miserable and debilitating migraine.  So my numbers aren't perfect for this week. 

• 15 minute days/week = 6/7 days
• 15 minute days/Jan = 29/31 days
• 15 minute days/Feb = 1/1 days
• Success rate = 93.75%

I was just out of commission for one day thankfully. It's been a long time since I've had a migraine that bad. Being retired seems to have greatly reduced the number of migraines I have. Wonder why? 

So how are you doing at getting in your stitching time so far this year?