
Happy Tuesday! I wanted to chat today about one of my oldest works in progress. I picked it up again last week and am determined to finish it, for real this time.

I pulled these fabrics for a Kaleidoscope quilt in early April 2012. Whoa, 9 years ago! It's a mix of two collections by Tula Pink*: Neptune and Prince Charming. I paired it with Quilter's Linen* by Robert Kaufman. I think the color is Parchment, but I am not 100% sure since I bought it so long ago.
All the pieces for this quilt were cut with a template. I used the Marti Mitchell Kaleido Ruler*.

This is one of those projects that I would go years without working on it. I know I brought it to a few retreats without even taking it out of my bag! To be honest, this is not the type of piecework that I really enjoy and that made me avoid it at times. It's also tough when so much time goes by, your tastes change. This quilt was just never a priority to finish. For 2021 one of my goals is to finish at least one long term work in progress. I listed this quilt specifically because it is such an old one for me.

Fast forward to last week, I didn't know what to work on so I decided to set myself a small goal to finish 10 blocks for this quilt every day. I had 50 blocks total left to make. Having that small goal really helped. I worked on them before lunch each day except Thursday. I have access to our car on Thursday mornings so that I can go do the grocery shopping. I didn't end up in the sewing room that day, so I made 20 blocks on Friday to make up for it.

10 blocks a day was so much more manageable a task than thinking about all 50 blocks at once. It also motivated me to sew almost every day, which is good. I've really struggled with finding a good routine, especially this year. I only dedicated about an hour a day to this project, and I made so much progress. I think I'm going to try to use this system going forward, to try to get back into a better routine of sewing every day, instead of in randome spurts.

It is so satisfying to be done with these blocks! Now I'm just finalizing the layout and I can start piecing them together. I hope to have the top put together by the end of the week. I will probably end up piecing a backing from my stash. At one point I had a matching backing, but got rid of it before we moved. I'm tempted to buy a backing for it, but I know I should just piece something from what I have in my stash. We'll see!

My new goal now is to get this quilt completely finished during the first half of 2021, and tackle another one of my long term works in progress in the second half. That would be awesome, I hope I can make that happen.
Happy Quilting!
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