My New Year's Resolutions:

Resolution #1: Finish...

My Midsummer Night's Dream Quilt or as I lovingly refer to it, "the Swamp Quilt." This nine-patch and snowball quilt was essentially my first quilt. In my naivete, and despite my mom's best advice, I decided to make this into a Queen size quilt. I thought, a Queen size quilt is no harder than a small quilt, just more blocks! Yeah right! That's why this quilt still isn't finished!

I love the green theme print. Five years later, it is still one of my all time favorite fabrics! The 9-Patch & Snowball was the first block that I ever learned how to make. Since I decided to start this quilt a week or so after making that first block, this pattern became the obvious choice for the quilt. :P I'm glad that it worked out that way though because I like the feeling that the quilt has of looking out little windows or through a fence into a magical swamp just beyond. My funny bone insisted on a frog prince. I had no desire to add Nick Bottom or any variation thereof to my quilt, and I like to think that Puck might just as easily have turned a prince into a frog as a weaver into an ass.

To complete this quilt, I need to add another column of 12-inch blocks. Each block is made up of two 9-Patches and 2 Snowballs (top row= AB, bottom row= BA), so the 9-Patch squares and the Snowball squares are each 6 inches. The blocks that I want to add on are about half complete (I think), so I'm hoping that this will only be about 2-3 days worth of work. I also need to add an outer border which will be another few days. Fortunately for my strained budget, I already have the backing fabric (a gorgeous tone-on-tone in a pale apple-mint green).

Resolution #2: Finish...

I'm not a very good photographer, so I always feel a need to explain the poor quality of my pictures. In this case, these are just a few of the blocks that make up the quilt. I grabbed these randomly to put in a picture for this post (i.e. the blocks don't really look that good together here.)

I usually refer to this as my Northwind quilt, after the name of the block, but since I have several Northwind WIP, I guess it needs a proper name? Maybe, Frosty Northwind? The main fabric that I'm using is Michael Miller's Fairy Frost in wedge wood blue.

This is another huge quilt, but it didn't start out that way. I wanted a gradient effect to this quilt, so I picked out a 32 fat quarters in various shades of blue and green and sewed them together into 16 12-inch blocks. But the first time that I laid the blocks out together, I could see that I hadn't managed the effect that I intended because A. I didn't have enough fabrics to really create a gradient look and B. all the different fabrics were too busy together. So I picked out this Fairy Frost to be my background fabric and started over. Since I already had 32 fabrics, it just seemed like a natural to add in four more fabrics and make a 36 block quilt, but since the blocks are each 12 inches, the quilt is now very large. Still, I like it much better this way, so I won't complain.

The Northwind block is probably my favorite quilt block design. The block itself isn't too difficult to put together, but sewing the blocks to each other gets really FRUSTRATING really FAST from trying to match the points on each block. On this quilt, I still have 3-4 blocks to finish and then I need to start sewing the blocks together. I haven't sewn any blocks together yet because since every block has a different fabric in it, I feel like I need to lay the quilt out and see how they all work together before sewing them. This mean that I still have a lot of work to do on this quilt!

Resolution 3: ? Well, I really thought about putting another project here, but I feel like I'm putting too much on myself, so resolution #3 will be to actually do resolutions 1 and 2!

Have a Great Day!

Lisa