Silly Putty Days and Year End Reckoning

 I'm calling these Silly Putty Days because I'm having to be flexible on a whole new level. Last weekend, when I thought I'd be having a quiet low key Christmas, I ended up throwing a big Christmas Eve event, a busy Christmas Day, and four out of town guests. 

This weekend when I thought I'd be throwing a big event today, it's postponed due to illness (not mine) and instead of having a houseful I'm only going to have two grandkids, so I decided to celebrate their birthday today instead. As soon as I finish blogging I'll go make a birthday cake. I had to completely rearrange the freezer to get the food for the big event that's now postponed in there, so I wasn't wasting food. 

I did have a couple of days with the grandkids earlier this week, which was great, but I'm on round two of antibiotics for a tooth infection which is kind of taking the wind out of my sails a bit. I have a dental appointment on the 10th to deal with all that, but they can't do much while an infection is raging and the first round of antibiotics didn't knock it out. I'm feeling a bit better now, and the swelling in my face is much better, so that's good. 

So overall, I've had a bunch of company, but not always who I thought was coming. I've thrown events I hadn't planned, and postponed stuff I had. Where I had planned on celebrating Family Christmas today, I ended up taking down all the Christmas decorations today instead.

You can imagine I've fallen way behind on the mystery quilt. I've done most of the cutting for clues four and five, but only sewn a couple units of each. Using my Studio cutter for the cutting makes short work of that. I decided to make one block of clue six just to see how it looks, since my colors are drastically different. 

The colors are pretty off in this pic, I'll try to get a better one later. Since I'm using men's shirts as my colors, I will have multiple shades of solids mixed in with the plaids and stripes. The burgundy background is constant throughout, I bought yardage of that. 

Oh, I did get some Christmas Goodies for my quilting!

DH got me two jelly rolls and some fat quarters. He knows me well.

As for my year end reckoning, I finished 21 quilts in 2021. Nine finishes were UFO's. Three were WIPS that were started in 2020, but I had never set them aside so I more consider them WIPS than UFO's. The other nine were new starts, but I'm OK with that, because any new starts that were finishes didn't become a UFO! I have the sizes of all my finished quilts written down, but I don't have the headspace right now to figure out the yardage used. It is no doubt over 100 yards, especially considering I used about 30 yards of flannel making burp rags, and at least eight yards making bowl cozies that weren't even quilting projects. I finished two King sized quilts, one queen, one full, and several twins. Yeah, over 100 yards easily. 

My empty spools for 2021 don't look very impressive, but it still represents 6.5 miles of thread. I have several almost empty cones, so next year should look like more. 

I haven't looked back on my goals for 2021. I still haven't gotten a quilt on my bed, but I did meet all my deadlines this year. I know I had hoped to bust more scraps, which I have done. I think I wanted to sew up a couple quilt kits, which I haven't done. It's a mixed bag of met goals and good intentions unfulfilled! Isn't that a typical year?

I know I had planned on being low buy for 2021, and I completely failed at that!  I had some huge fabric purchases! The quilt specific fabrics I bought are already used or cut out, Everything else I purchased was basics, solids, tonals, or blenders. I've already cut into a lot of those too. 2022 needs to be a low buy year because we have a big trip planned in the fall, and I need to save as much money as I can towards that. I already know I need about a twelve inch square of yellow minky for some applique on a baby quilt I'm making. I think I'll look on etsy since I need such a small amount, although my MIL got me a Hobby Lobby gift card, so maybe I'll check there first. I tried Joann's, but they only had a harvest gold type of yellow. I need a lighter softer yellow. I was hoping for a remnant, since I just need four crescent moon appliques out of it, but I haven't found one. I will likely have to buy batting some time this year, but I'm going to wait until I absolutely have to have some. I have a full roll of cotton batting, but I'm almost out of poly batting. Thankfully poly is the cheaper one to buy, so I'm not too stressed about that. 

I know of two deadline quilts for this year, a twin and a baby quilt, for different families but both due in March. The twin sized quilt I've already started sewing. Besides any deadline quilts that come up, I really just want to keep doing what I did this year, finish UFO's, start quilts that use stash and scraps, and have fun!