Finish or Begin?

I read a Blog post at the beginning of the year from Quilting with Love called “Finisher or Opener: Which One Are You?” Inspired yet again to wrangle my store of fabrics and projects, I made my list of projects in finish in 2019.  I discovered some things.

• Many projects had been in a limbo for years really. Did I reach a challenging spot, find a mistake, or did I just get bored?
• So many projects bought and stored just waiting to be started!
• Several projects so large (lots of pieces), did I need a break, or did another deadline necessitate putting it away.

Then I visit shops, follow blogs, go on retreats, see my customer quilts and get inspired by something newer yet!  Now we are to 90 days left in the year and I am finding that I probably didn’t cull well enough!  Recently published by Modern Quilt Studio,  Redicovering Your Stash has some great ideas for helping me in 2020. I will share all the finishes later, right now I am getting busy and trying to finish strong.

In the meantime I wanted to share a start and finish for 2019.  In January I found a layer cake from years ago (I believe I will never buy a pre cut again).  I opened it and gave away instantly several of the squares. Then I went in search of a layer cake friendly project that wasn’t too big.  Something “quick”.  Recuperating from knee surgery at the end of March, and somewhat confined to one floor I began sewing and cutting with this pattern, called Arcade, in mind:

As usual, I found myself changing things here and there, and I tried starching the fabrics before sewing this time.  I liked how nicely the blocks pressed with the starch.  I sewed the blocks together at a quilt retreat this past June:

Then began the trial and error of deciding how to quilt it.  I had purchased several skill builders sets from Joyce Lundrigan  for my Gammill Statler and thought these fabrics would be busy enough to allow variation in how the designs were suppose to look in the planned quilt for the skill.  What fun designs, and boy did they stitch out nicely!

I even found a large piece of yardage I had purchased to use as a backing, as well as a batting remnant…thus a complete quilt from my stash.  What joy!

And more than 17 hours later (is that quick?) it is fininshed.  I did block this one, and plan to gift it when next need a baby girl gift.