I think the last year is catching up to me. I’m finding myself more and more at a loss for what to write about. I have been talking to several friends who also blog, and I’m at least a little relieved to know it’s not just me. I feel like there’s a lot of been there done that going around. How do we come up with something new when we feel like there is nothing new?

I’ve been quilting for a long time. Seriously quilting for 31 years. I’ve been around long enough to see ideas that were out in the 90s, come out in the late 2010’s and are treated like it’s something brand new. Heck in the 90s, people were going back to the Kansas City Star Newspaper patterns that were published in the 20’s and 30’s so there wasn’t even much new in the 90s. We are always reinventing the craft and ourselves with it. If I step back a bit, the evolution is fascinating, even if I do get annoyed with the people who have no clue that what they are doing has already been done before.

For the longest time, I didn’t refer to myself as a quilter, I was a piecer. I made quilt tops that very rarely got turned into finished quilts. I could count on both hands, the number of quilts that got completely completed between 1990 and 2015 if I’m honest (not counting things like table runners, I mean big quilts here). All that changed in 2020.

I guess it started changing in 2018 when I upgraded the CAD system on the long arm, and gained some momentum in 2019, but 2020 I was going full steam ahead. I finished so many quilts last year. Finished a lot of UFOs and even made a couple of quilts from start to finish. Each one would get folded neatly and put into the pile on the bench in the living room. I like the pile. I can see them as I walk by and they are out where I can enjoy them.

This morning when I was making the bed it occurred to me that I now have enough quilts that I can put a different quilt on the bed probably every month this year. What a treat, I guess I didn’t realize I had gotten that far along. So today on the day when I can’t seem to figure out what to say, here’s 500 words and a quilt.