A Couple Goals for the New Year

I haven't really prepared a list of goals for 2021, but I do have one specific goal and that is to finish a queen size quilt that will be a wedding gift for a grandchild.  I think I explained earlier that I wanted to have a quilt for each of my five grandchildren's wedding prepared so that in case I am not here when they do get married, they will each get a quilt.  This is my last one.

I have decided to make an on point medallion quilt.  I have 13 12" blocks made (I will need one more).  I got the block patterns from Barbara Brackman's blog (civilwarquilts.blogspot.com) .  I saw this medallion design on her blog (I believe) and liked it, so I reproduced it.  At least, I thought it was from her blog.  Now I can't find it.  I will need to add sashing so it each side will equal 2 blocks.  The upper left edge has some blue and off white fabric that I will probably use as borders for the medallion.

You might be able to get an idea of the layout from how I put them up on my design wall.  This isn't the final layout, but I saw a lot of medallion quilts in Pinterest with this same design.  Each of the 12" blocks will have a 1" border.  Then I will need to make the setting triangles and make the border - probably 2 or 3 that will make it come out to the size needed.  The setting triangles will probably be blue and I hope I can find a nice border print for the final border.

When I was looking for a medallion pattern to use, this is the quilt that I was inspired by.

In my last post, I showed you some blocks like this and I have made some more and put them in a box.  I have a lot of the pieces cut and will work on this from time to time.

I also cut some pieces to make the same block out of these fabrics.  The squares on the top right will be the center block and the smaller squares will be used to make the points of the star.  These will measure 9" and will be used to possibly make a baby quilt or some table runners.

In between sewing, I am working on family history.  My sister brought a cassette tape that my Dad had made about his life.  I borrowed a tape player from my neighbor and transcribed it - 7 pages!  Then I started looking for more tapes to transcribe that I know we have somewhere, but I couldn't find them anywhere.  While I was looking, I did find a lot of old letters and pictures and I decided to start writing up my life story.  I have 3 pages so far.  I found some old "Date books" - the kind we used to get from card stores - like hallmark.  Actually, my parents had a gift shop and sold Hallmark cards, so 2 of the date books were from their store. The one that say's Gibson was for 1962 and that's the year they bought that store (in Elgin, IL) They got Hallmark cards sometime after that.  I had entered the dates I had with my DH - the first date was January 22, 1960!  It has been fun to find old love letters from him (that I had forgotten about), some things I had written down.  I didn't have a diary, but at times I did write things in a note book.  Luckily, I still had them and also some articles from the school paper, etc.

I will try to post more often from now on.  And visit blogs more often.  It seems like the time is going by so fast and I am so busy.  Isn't it weird?  But I'm finally getting some things done that needed to be done, so that's good.