2025 Quilts

These are the quilts I completed in 2025. This means all the way to bound. There are many projects waiting in the wings to be quilted and bound. I hope by the ned of 2025 to have reduced that backlog significantly.

A large part of my quilting uses fabrics that I inherited from my mother. I’m using her extensive stash to experiment, learn and play. You can learn more about it at The UFO Project.

I also bought a longarm quilting machine in May of 2024. I had previously owned one, and had a quilting business for a few years in 2005-2007. We moved in 2007 and I sold the machine as I was not going to have room or time in the new location. I am relearning how to use a longarm and am using tops I have purchased off of eBay. They are not great works of piecing.

When I took stock at the end of 2024 of how much quilting I had actually done, I decided I needed to focus on actually quilting. Much of my time was devoted to videos, blog posts and courses and I am starting to feel the effects of not enough creative time. So in 2025 I have committed to spending a larger chunk of time each weekday actually creating!

January

Christmas went long 🙂 and I also did a lot of piecing instead of quilting.

February

I made a more serious commitment to myself to do more practice on my longarm. I have piecing projects in my head that I will want to do a good job on doing the quilting…so much practice is needed!

Hawaiian eBay

This quilt is made from blocks I purchased off of eBay back in the early 2000s. Since I bought it as blocks, I was able to square them up and produce a relatively flat quilt.

The quilting was practicing feathers, and learning to do a tight flame/leafy filler. The hibiscus flower continuous line design looked better on paper than it does quilted.

Simple Heart

This top was a trial of a possible design for a simple heart quilt pattern. I decided to go another way for the pattern, but when I saw the top in my to be quilted pile at the beginning of the month, I felt the urge to finish it to hang in my foyer by the 14th.

The quilting used both ruler and freehand work.

I experimented with a new way to attach the binding so that it would hit the points of the quilting precisely. I’m looking at new options to my preferred method which involves lots of pins. I did have a fair amount of success with the binding coming out in the right place, but I wasn’t pleased by the amount of wiggle in the edge as it’s hanging.

Ugly eBay

This top, purchased from eBay in the early 2000s, is not only pieced badly, but not my favorite colors or fabrics. But at least it only cost me $13.67 🙂

However, there was one fabric – that looks perfectly wrinkled – that I found fascinating.

I practiced various freehand techniques on it. I did a pretty bad job too! Maybe it was a little too liberating to be quilting a top I didn’t like?

I did learn a lot about which things I want to work harder on perfecting and which I felt sort of ‘eh’ about when they were quilted out.

One thing I especially got practice on, but wasn’t feeling too picky about was dealing with the fact that the borders were not put on properly. There was all sorts of extra fullness in the borders, and eventually I gave in and let it pucker and tuck.

When I made the backing I matched the pattern. I had planned to try the whole glue method, but after folding and ironing, I realized I didn’t have the right glue. So I pin matched it. Pin matching works for me, but I still plan to get some glue and try out the other way soon.

Since I was already not liking this whole quilt, I did a machine finished binding on it. I have yet to like the result of my own machine finished binding, but it’s supposed to save time, right? I don’t think it has yet LOL. By the time I get it lined up and looking how I like, I always feel like it would have been faster just to hand finish it. But I gave it another try – it might be my last try!

In the end, this makes an excellent dog quilt!