Happy Old Year Ending – OccasionalPiece

I see wrap-up posts often on people’s blogs, and while I feel like my 200 Quilts List (above) is sort of a way to move through my quilts, I present, one more time, 2014’s quilts:

One thing for sure, I certainly don’t work in a series, or make quilts that all look alike.

There is one more quilt that is not here which will show up in next year’s feed, although I count it as one of my fifteen quilts for this year. What else have I been doing?

Circle Blocks. The next one will arrive at the beginning of January.

How about some bags? 2014 seemed to be the year of making bags, including a Mini Sew-Together Bag and the dreaded/beloved Weekender Bag (I did my own version of this).

I snuck in one more Bee Block, a Dresden Plate block for Rene of Rene Creates.

And the last things in the sewing categories were odds-and-ends and wonky, silly crows for a Halloween decoration. We took a big trip to Croatia and Budapest, we ripped out lawn in our front yard and relandscaped for better water conservation, we visited children and grandchildren and parents and sisters and lots of other relatives. It’s easy on those “don’t want to get out of your pajamas” days to think that you haven’t accomplished a thing. But in these year-end reviews, I can see I’ve really given my sewing machine a work-out.

Happy Old Year Ending!

Finally! I can show a these little wristlets — mini-zip purses with straps — that I made for Christmas, because I gave the last one away yesterday. Just a simple zip, to which I added a loop out of the side seam, and attached a strap. They all have clocks on them, with a crazy mix of patterns around the central clock. For who ever has enough time? So I gave some away.

The top photo is another clock in the series, and the bottom shows the stap flipped back over, or as I like to call it “Bashful Portrait of Zip Bags.”

I also made up some giant canvas bags for my grandsons (hope the last grandson isn’t reading this post–we haven’t given that family their gifts yet!), and attached a tag that read: “Some toys you put together, and some toys you take apart.” Along with the item in the bag (see following photos), we also gave them a tool box with some basic tools.

Yep. I went to a TV repair shop and picked up some old electronics (VCR, CD players) and slipped them into their bags. They went right to work, taking them apart. They told me later that they’d finished them the next day. All of this was inspired by my mother, who when visiting our family when my boys were little, got one of them a television to take apart.

Finishing up this quilt. I was arranging the scraps of the remaining fabrics, trying to come up with a pieced back that didn’t look all garbage-y like my usual pieced backs do. My husband walked in and after inquiring what I was doing, I confessed I really didn’t do pieced backs very well. Sometimes I like to show the backs of my quilts and I’ve just never gotten the hang of that artsy look that some quilters can do so well. We went to the guest bedroom closet (AKA, fabric storage warehouse) to see if any of the Marimekko fabrics would work, when lo! and behond! there was a hunk of the red “joy” fabric, a coordinate to the Countdown to Christmas line. I’d forgotten all about it, but this morning I pieced it together and now that quilt can be quilted. (What you see on top are the pillow shams. Still working on those.)

I gave away this book for Christmas, and bought one for myself, too.

Not only does it have a lot of prompts for good deeds to to daily, there’s also room to record a deed that you did–an interesting way to keep a journal for a year, I think.

How about instead of a handmade card, we all make a handmade quilt? I like that.

So Happy New Year, everyone. Let that old year go, just like it says above, and enjoy this first day of the year! Now head back over to Lee’s blog, Freshly Pieced, to see others with WIP Wednesday projects. Maybe it will inspire you to pull out some of your own to get those Works-In-Progress quilts move to Work-Completed quilts?