My Quilting Goals: November, 2001

Most quilters seem to have more ideas for projects than they could ever possibly get to. I'm continually making, revising, re-revising, and discarding lists of potential projects, and I think I'm fairly typical in that way.

I was flipping through an old notebook last week, and a list of my intended quilt projects from November 2001 fell out. It was a strange souvenir from a point when I was trying to decide whether or not to take quilting seriously (I eventually decided that, yes, I will). It was also a good reminder of how these lists are, sure, very much subject to change, but also of how some of the things that you put on your to-do lists sometimes actually get done.

Like a lot of my quilt project lists, the 2001 plan laid out three top priorities and several "other" potential projects that I could maybe work in if I found the time. And here they are, the quilts I intended to make six and a half years ago, along with the stories of what happened, or didn't happen, next.

"1) Autumn Puzzle" For this, my top priority on the list, I have... no real memory of what I had in mind. I can kind of put together what I must have been thinking from the title, but I don't remember wanting to make such a quilt or why I thought it would be a good idea. This one never even made it to the graph paper stage.

"2) Denim Quilt" This one, my first ever scrap-and-salvage quilt, DID get made. A clunky design from 6" x 6" squares of scrap denim, it is an unlovely but incredibly warm (and heavy!) winter blanket.

"3) Log Cabin Quilt" This turned into Log Cabin, the piece that was to occupy much of the next four years of my quilting life. It's possible that I started the denim quilt and the log cabin piece imagining that they would be easier than the "Autumn Puzzle," and would be a good warm-up for it after a couple years in which I hadn't done a lot of quilting. That would have been good reasoning, but apparently I got immersed in Log Cabin and forgot all about the piece that I was ostensibly warming up for.

"--> Around the World for {redacted}" This one is kind of funny and kind of sad. My relationship with the person in question had never been especially stable, and the gesture of friendship that I had in mind in November 2001 is especially ironic now, since I have only seen the person at three or four formal events in the intervening years. Maybe if I'd actually made the quilt, we'd be closer friends today. But, I kind of doubt it.

"--> Landscape With Animals" One of the first quilts I made, the Cow Quilt, has always been a crowd-pleaser. I've often thought about making a bigger, better version of the same idea someday. But so far I haven't."

"--> Book of Flags" This was a strange idea for a quilt-and-bookarts project, and I actually did quite a bit of work on the text (although none on the quilting) before shelving the idea sometime in 2002. I recently dug it back out, tinkered with it a little bit, and changed it from its complicated original form into a still strange but much simpler blog project. It no longer has much to do with quilting, but at least it is seeing the light of day. You can see bits of it here, and here.

"--> Kim & MB" This was to be a wedding quilt for friends, so it's kind of surprising that it's the last item on the list. Did I think that I would knock the other six items out in a few months, and then get to the wedding quilt? Surely I wasn't ~that~ naive. It might be that I was just unsure of whether or not I could pull a good wedding quilt off, so I was waffling about whether or not to try. Whatever the case, I ~did~ make the quilt, and presented it to the lovely couple the following summer.

Overall, this makes my completion rate about 3 1/2 out of 7. I suppose I could do a lot worse than to hit 50% on all of my to-do lists.