The 2015 Year in Review

I wish I had a wonderful post all prepared for the first day of the year. Something that would sum up all the things I did and learned. Maybe 2016 will the be the year that gets that treatment. Because I certainly didn't plan well enough to give a good summary of 2015.

Let's get the most important part out of the way. How many spools of thread did I manage to empty during 2015? In 2014 I worked through 21 spools or cones of thread. I have been buying thread by the cone, so I don't foresee this trend continuing into the future. It just takes so long to empty a cone of the 2000 to 6000 yards one can hold. 8 cones, 6 spools and 9 pre-wound bobbins of thread emptied in 2015. Total: 14 spools/cones.

Big events:

• I had a big promotion at work and a new job
• We moved to a new town so I could have a better commute (from the old house the new job was 1.5 hours of drive-time)

We bought a new house, because we don't do things by halves, this is my new fabric storage

• I went from a tiny sewing studio to one big enough for my long-arm frame at 10 feet
• Total blog posts for 2015: 133

• I set a goal of quilting four charity quilts a month during 2015. The final count was 50 quilts.

• Sew My Stash 2015 Projects - I did manage to make several projects from my stash. One of the biggest things I did was go through and make stacks and stacks of totes using the free pattern available from The Green Bag Lady. If you live in a state where plastic bags are on the decline or even no long available, this is the perfect alternative and it uses about 1/2 yard of fabric per bag. Not into sewing? Don't worry, The Green Bag Lady has you covered with monthly give-aways when you comment on her blog.

I also made more than a couple scrappy quilts that did use up some of that stash. This quilt I pieced the backing from leftovers I had on-hand. You know your stash is out-of-hand when you can make an entire quilt from fabrics on-hand.

Even the binding came from the leftover binding bin.

My How to Make a Scoodie tutorial received five more comments in 2015 and is up to 330 page views. I'm so glad people are still using the tutorial and I love hearing about your projects.

I tried to pick a favorite quilt from 2015 and just couldn't do it. Here are my favorite quilts from 2015. There were more finishes, but these are my favorites. I didn't buy any additional fabric to finish this quilt, not even backing.

• All You Need is Love
• Grand Illusion
• Mania
• Bazaar Delight
• Scrap Vortex
• Big Ass Heart
• Slayer
• Scrappy Bee

Do you have a favorite quilt of the year?

Goals for 2016:

• quilt 4 charity quilts a month
• finish at least 6 unfinished objects during the year (I think I'll capture this in another post)
• continue to work through my fabric collection with more projects aimed at Sew My Stash 2016
• start the new year on a fabric diet and try to stick to it
• spend some time working with InkScape and 5D Embroidery to create digitized embroidery designs
• continue to blog at least three times a week (but I'm not going to get spun up if I don't meet this one). I'm taking to heart some things Christa of Christa Quilts said on her blog in December. 
• add to this list when I find something that needs to be added, new goals are important
• work with curved piecing

I also want to share this great post from Mandalei Quilts from Sew Mama Sew. I often read comments from quilters on quilting groups that they don't know what is a fair price for a long arm quilter. If you don't know much about having your quilt quilted by a professional long arm quilter I recommend you take a read and learn about this part of quilting. I don't think everyone should become a long arm quilter but I do believe you should arm yourself with as much information as you can before you take your hard work in to be quilted.

What are your goals for the new year?