A belated Happy New Year and good wishes to all for a wonderful 2023!
If you follow mew on any of my social media channels you will know that 2022 wasn’t the best year for me and my family. Personal illness and injury, a daughter coming out of school to be home educated, an elderly mother with ailments and a fall to name a few.
However, through all this there was some sewing and some finishes. Here’s my list of WIPS from this time last year, which I found by accident when sorting through the magazine shelf for the #declutterchallenge2023 - more on this to come!
There were 19 projects originally on the list, of which 5 were finished and 2 were passed on; two new projects were started as yet unfinished; and two cot quilts were started and finished.
So there were 7 finished quilts and 14 to be carried forward to 2023. Although once I have found them all over the coming weeks I will reassess whether I do in fact want to continue with it or whether I will pass it on. There was something so good last year admitting that I didn’t actually want to finish a project and to move it out of my space. I am sure that I will also unearth more when I sort out all the boxes and drawers so that number may well rise!
Pictures are of my finishes less the 2 cot quilts which can’t be shown yet because they are for a new fabric line not yet released!
It feels good to see these finishes and actually 7 finishes is more than I thought I would have had with the year I had last year.
There were customer quilts, for which I am truly thankful. I am very lucky to have loyal, repeat customers and sometimes they had to bear with me last year. I was sometimes not able to communicate with people as quickly as I would have liked to and sometimes the quilts were delayed but people stuck by me and for that I am sincerely thankful. This year I hope to be back to to offering my 'normal' service with speedy communication and a quick turn around of quilts.
What does 2023 hold?
Well, first up are GCSEs! My youngest daughter came out of school last January to be home educated. She was in Y10 and is now in Y11 which is GCSE year. As an external candidate you can chose to do some exams in November or January aswell as the usual May/June summer suite. My youngest started her GCSEs yesterday and has several more over the next couple of weeks.
This will be followed in the summer by more GCSEs for her and A Levels for my other daughter so up until then I have scaled back my teaching and workshop commitments but will continue to quilt for customers.
There is going to be another moving of my longarm studio …. We moved house in August 2021 and at that time my longarm quilting machine went into a temporary studio over at my mum’s. It was always the plan to remodel one of the outbuildings at our new house for it to become my quilting studio. Well that time is coming up this spring and I am soooo excited at the thought of having all my gear in one place and at home. Whilst I have been able to continue quilting for others during this time I find that I have not been able to quilt much for myself or to develop my skills through playtime. Here's to more playtime for me in 2023.
The other thing I am hoping to do for myself is dressmaking – there you go, I am putting it out there in the hope that it will hold me accountable. It has been a long held wish of mine to have a me made wardrobe and I hope that this year I can start to build it. I have two courses earmarked to help with that goal but really I just have to commit the time to doing it. I have done several pattern drafting courses in the past both here and in New Zealand but I don't really progress from making the blocks. This time I thought I would start with commercial patterns in the hope that I will finish an item and also to increase my construction skills .... all with the hope that one day I will be able to design clothes for myself.