2018 Ambitions: Successes and Failures

You had to wonder if Mother Nature decided to play along with April Fool's Day this year.  We had freezing rain most of the way home yesterday.  It wasn't heavy enough to make the roads bad, but it certainly was nerve racking wondering if conditions would get any worse.  We got home without incident and thankfully the Scientist in Training only hit one minor patch on her way back to school last night.  We are under a winter weather watch this morning for more freezing rain.   The calendar may say spring, but winter hasn't left yet. 

Speaking of things that are still hanging around, Vintage Dresses is still up on the design wall. 

 Vintage Dresses by Charise Randell

The third row of dresses is ready to be sewn together.  That leaves two rows of dresses and three more rows of sashing to finish.  The One Monthly Goal for March was to get all the sashing made have all the rows sewn together.  That didn't happen.  This is only the 4th time in the two years I've been playing along with the OMG that I didn't finish a monthly goal.  March was just really busy on both the work and family fronts.  Looking at it that way, I'm just going to be happy that there was good progress in spite of the busy month. That's pretty much it for what's going on in the sewing room for the last week.  I'm linking up with the usual suspects:

Monday Making
Design Wall Monday
Main Crush Monday

The rest of this post is a review.  Back in December, I developed a list of quilting ambitions as part of Quilting Jet Girls 2018 Planning Party.  It helps me remember to celebrate my successes and stay focused on my goals for the year if I review my progress on that list at the end of each quarter.  So here's the status of those ambitions.  

Ambition #1: Shorten the UFO List
                       No Progress

Ambition #2: Participate in select quilt along/mysteries 
                       Progress:  Squared Away quilt along is started

 Squared Away Sampler
designed by Mari (The Academic Quilter)
The 2018 Rainbow Scrap Challenge Project

Ambition #3:  Find 15 minutes to stitch each day
                        Success rate = 91%

Ambition #4:   Stash Management
                         Purchase less than 5 yards per quarter (4 yards in)
                         Organize the stash - a little progress
                         Use only stash fabrics for new projects - yes
  
Ambition #5:  Blog once a week
                        41 blog posts for 13 weeks = 3/week

I'm doing better than I expected on my ambitions for the year.  Finding time to stitch, blog and limit the amount of stash additions is going well.  The biggest disappointment is that the UFO list isn't going down.  There has been progress on several UFOs, they just haven't progressed to the point of being finished. So for second quarter, I need to work a little harder on moving those almost finished UFOs along.  

Stash Report - Week 51 of 2013

Just one more week in 2013 for stash busting.  That's a bit hard to believe.  It seems to happen this way every year, the month of December just goes by in a blur.  With the first just a little over a week away, decisions about 2014 stash busting goals need to be made.  

I spent yesterday waiting for the power to go out.  We were in the dark pink "heavy" icing part of the map on the Weather Channel.  We did get a lot of ice, but the roads were just wet.  Weirdest ice storm I can remember.  These ice cycles were just outside the restaurant we ate dinner at last night.  

It's amazing we didn't have more power outages with that much ice building up on things. 

Not a lot of stitching this week.  I ended up working late most evenings since last week was my last for the year and I had lots to finish up.  Add in the last minute Christmas shopping and addressing Christmas cards, there hasn't been a lot of time spent in in the sewing room sewing.  Since I really expected to lose power at some point, I did take some time out of holiday preparations to stitch a few 4-patches for Clue 4 of Celtic Solstice first thing yesterday.  I didn't want to have the machine on if the power failed. So this week's stash report is pretty meager on the outgoing.

Used last week:  0.40 yards
Added last week:  0 yards

Used for 2013:  65.28 yards
Add for 2013:  285.83 yards

Net stashed:  220.55 yards  

At least there was nothing added last week.  No way am I getting back to the black this year, but I have hope next year of actually making it to the stash reduction side.  

That's it for my stash report.  For more on the state of stashes around the world, check out the posts over at Patchwork Times.  

Stash Report - August 21st

I really did sew this week, but most of it was sewing together bits and pieces that have already been counted on the stash report.  It didn't help that Connecting Threads had marked down some of their batiks.  I was unable to resist that temptation and ordered a few half yard cuts for Kiddo's Jigsaw quilt.  I definitely have more then enough fabrics to choose from now, so it's time to get out of acquisition mode.  Here's the report:

Used this week: 1.02 yards
Added this week: 6.5 yards

Used year to date:  42.5 yards
Added year to date:  60.25 yards

Net stashed for 2011:  17.75 yards

My objective this year is to use more then I buy.  I think I can still manage to make that objective, but I'm going to have to finish up some projects where the back can come from the stash.  

I had not ordered batiks from Connecting Threads before these came on Tuesday.  The colors are bright and the feel is nice. 

Kiddo loves the colors.  These all need to be scanned into the computer so we can start playing with the color layout she wants for her quilt. 

For more tales of stash management, check out Patchwork Times. 

Making a Layer Cake to Bust Some Stash

Only in quilting can you talk about making a layer cake to reduce something!   I decided to participate in the Layer Cake Quilt Along being sponsored over on the Moose on a Porch's blog.  So I spent some time last night rummaging through my fabric tote bins looking for the accent and border fabric.  I bought a layer cake a couple of years ago to make a quilt for kiddo's school auction.  I had quite a number of squares left over after the quilt was done.  Turns out I had bought some yardage from the same collection, so that will be the border.  Finding the accent was hard.  Nothing really seemed to work well.  I'm going to try white as the accent and hope it's not too stark against the darker fabrics.  The layer cake and border fabric are a from a fabric collection called Patti Paisley. 

So that's one new project that will run into May of next year.  I have two BOMs that should finish up at the end of the year, so it will be nice to have something else already started.  Everything for this project will from the stash, which if you've been looking at my weekly stash reports is definitely a step in the right direction.