Quilting Accomplishments – And Those Yet To Come

At the end of 2009 I realized that I had not kept a good list of the quilts I had made. So, I sat down and tried to remember all of the quilts I had made since I rediscovered quilting in 1998. I created an Excel spreadsheet quilt log to keep track of the quilts, note who received them, estimate the date each was finished, and saved the link to a photo of the quilt (if I had a photo).



It turns out I’ve completed 33 quilts since 1998, half of which were bed-sized and half were wall-sized. Half of the quilts have been given as gifts, a few are earmarked for gifts, and some have my name on them!

At first I was really proud of my accomplishments until I realized that was only 3 finished quilts per year.

Certainly I had made more than that! Then I inventoried the quilt tops that are ready to quilt – another 21 quilts, and completed blocks just waiting to be set and borders added – 5 more quilts. That brought the total to 59, so my average per year was closer to 6 per year.

My quilt log was looking pretty good, so I decided to inventory how many quilts are in various stages of completion – and that number is an even dozen – clearly enough projects to keep me busy much of this year, even if I don’t start any new projects.

Since I was on a roll, I inventoried how many kits and blocks-of-the-month are waiting to be made. I have kits for nearly as many quilts as I have made in the past 11 years – 32 kits or full BOMs neatly stored for me to work on. (Several are appliqué, and now that I’ve nearly mastered Kim Diehl’s machine appliqué, I’ll probably tackle more of them than I would have if I’d done hand appliqué.)

So what about the stash of fat quarters, yardage, and charm packs, layer cakes and jelly rolls? I would guess that I have enough for at least another 50 quilt tops!

I read somewhere that no one refers to a bunch of unread books as “stash” – instead, it is a “library”. Perhaps we need a better name than “stash” for unstarted quilting projects.