Lovely Finishes and Failures in 2014

As part of A Lovely Year of Finishes, I set 10 monthly goals and mostly met them.  But whether the goal was accomplished or not, I made progress.  Here are my 2014 Lovely Finishes (and failures).

In January, I completed the last of the hand-pieced blocks from an old UFO.

These blocks were begun as a Quilt-along in 2010. I was living in Dallas then and, after putting them aside, two moves later, I picked them up again, discovered I didn't have one of the patterns, had no luck getting a copy from the designer and so created my own.

Figuring out how to design blocks like this was a great experience and led me to design more "sunflower" block patterns later in the year.

I blogged about my January lovely finish here.

I goofed and didn't declare a Lovely Finish goal in early February, but I had a redwork project in mind and completed this pair of designs for a pair of pillows–I still haven't done anything with these beyond the stitching ... look for them to become an 2015 Lovely goal.

I didn't blog about my March finish (just linked from the photo on Flickr), probably because I expected to completely finish my Tea Towel challenge (a goal for the challenge), but I did meet my Lovely Finish goal for March by finishing the top. 

This challenge quilt ended up being much larger than planned and, I confess, my idea for how I wanted to quilt it intimidated me a little ... which is probably why it is still unquilted.

(I am such a scaredy cat sometimes).

In April, I had another built-in Lovely goal, because of a Spring Challenge on the 15 Minutes of Play blog.


The 14 inch square pillow I made for the Spring Challenge is Blogged here: April's Lovely Finish - A Spring Challenge Pillow.

I joined the local quilt guild in May, and set a lovely goal of making a kids charity quilt for their May meeting.

I had such a blast playing with novelty charms in my stash when I made the quilt below, that I am planning to do it again this year.

I blogged about my May finish here: A Finish and a Plan for a Friday Night Sew-In.

This was my second attempt at spiral quilting–which went pretty well–and at trying the faux-piped binding technique–which wasn't very successful.

I would give that faux piped binding thing one more try in the project that was my June lovely goal.

That quilt, which I called Pinwheel HSTeria was made from the bonus triangle squares from the charity quilt as well as some smaller ones from another project and some string fabric borders made from novelty fabric that I found in my fabric bin with the novelty charms–it felt like a little quilt made from nothing but leftovers.



I had thought to add small buttons in the center of the small lavender pinwheel blocks (to hide the mis-matched seams) and Hilda kindly even sent me some itty bitty dark buttons for that purpose, but the wonkly little blocks grew on me and I ended up leaving them as is.

I blogged about this finish here: Pinwheel HSTeria–June's Lovely Finish.

(My third effort at making that faux piped binding went much better, but it still isn't my favorite way to make piped binding.)

In July, I put together a bunch of Silly String blocks made by friends at the Chicken River Modern Quilt Guild in Las Vegas (NM) at a workshop I led there.


My original plan was to make a tote ... but the blocks insisted they wanted to become a small quilt which I call String Theory.

This is another project that is still not quilted ... maybe next year? I considered it a lovely failure because I didn't get to "done done."

I blogged about it here: July's Lovely ... Failure. 

In August, work became a priority and I decided to take a lovely break.

I was having a hard time getting back to the habit of quilting and balancing my time between work and studio.

In September, I set a lovely goal to quilt the quilt below ... but only got it layered and basted and just barely started on the quilting.

I had to withdraw it from the guild show ... so humiliating.


To find my way back to FINISHING things, I worked with a local long-armer to quilt the quilts I finished for my October and November Lovely Finishes (shown below).

Sophie's Featherbed, my lovely finish for October  was finished in time for the local show ... and even won a ribbon.

I blogged about it here: A Shocking Finish.

I worked hard in November to finish my goal and, in spite of being hit by a car (while walking across the street) and having to move out of my house for a week when the boiler cracked, I managed to make the remaining blocks and assemble my Mod-Mod-sampler in time to enter it for QuiltCon.  (It is among the hundreds of rejected quilts.)

I blogged about my November finish here: An 11th Hour Finish for the 11th Month of a Year of Lovely Finishes.

December's finish was a sweet one: I finally finished all the blocks I needed to put together this Rainbow Scraps Challenge project ... begun almost 4 years ago.  I blogged about it here, last weekend: December's Lovely Finish.