Vivian's PHDs for 2011

Hi everyone! I am so happy I made it into Myra's PHD Challenge before the cut-off! I am a quilter from the Bronx, New York, a SAHM with a great DH and two teen sons. I have been participating in Finn's (of the "Pieces From My Scrap Bag" blog) Year-End Challenge for the last two years and also have done Jacqui's (of the Tallgrass Prairie Studio blog) Spring Finish Challenge and Bari's weekly Quilters Accountability to try to stay on track. Each time I get a little bit more done than if I hadn't participated but because of Quilters ADD, there are always more projects coming in than going out. However, Finn's Challenge struck a cord with me this year and I realized that I really want to clear the decks of all the lingering projects before adding to the pile with even more new ones. So Myra's Challenge is a chance to continue the momentum started at year end in the hopes of ending up with NO (that's right, I've said it), NO UFO's/PHD's at the end of 2011!! But as I said in a recent post on my blog, HSY's (pronounced "Hussies" and stands for Haven't Started Yet) will be another story!

So here are the tasks at hand for the first six months of 2011:

1. Denim Blue Lagoons

This is a string quilt and scrap denim project that was started in Summer 2009 with the intention of making new quilts for my two sons' beds and to give us a project to work on together when they are on school breaks. My sons have been/will be choosing and sewing together all the strip sets for the blocks and it's my job to cut the strips sets and their old jeans into the 60 degree triangles that make up the blocks. These are meant to be heavy winter quilts and I already have patterned fleece for the backings. The first quilts I made for them back in 2008 (which can be seen here, just scroll down a bit) are lighter for spring and summer.

The Blue Lagoon pattern is from Fons & Porter. It gives me a chance to make three types of quilt I haven't done before: a string quilt, a scrap denim quilt and a tumbling blocks design.

2. Underground Railroad/Pioneer Samplers

During this year's Spring Finish, I finished all the blocks for the UGRR and Pioneer Samplers from the books by Eleanor Burns of Quilt In A Day. There are fifteen UGRR blocks and twelve Pioneer blocks and I plan to quilt them back to back because historically these two events in American history happened during the same time period.

I already have the fabrics (all Civil War Repros, also true to the time period) for the sashing, cornerstones (seen here) and borders. I will have to photo print additional blocks of text to be incorporated into the layouts: one an explanation of the UGRR block symbols and the other some information about the history of the Pioneer movement that was in an article in my local newspaper.

3. Confetti

I love scrap quilts and for years have had a self-imposed "Scrap Quilt Challenge". The idea was to make one quilt/project each year primarily from scraps. This is one I have been working on for a while mostly because it calls for a lot of pieces and it has taken that long to collect them!

Interestingly, I had originally been collecting the fabrics to make two scrap quilts: another one also called Confetti that had been in a 2002 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting and had a similar four-patch and sashing center as this one and a seperate all french braid scrap quilt. But when I saw this one (in Quilters Newsletter, September 1997) that combined both types of blocks, I knew it would save me a lot of time in terms of collecting the scraps. I have a bunch of 2" squares still to be sewn up into the four patches and then can check if I need more. I'd like to get this one done as my SQC for 2011 .

4. Aunt Pricilla/Milky Way

This one was started waaayyy back in 2002 and was supposed to have been a housewarming gift for my cousin (o.k. probably too ambitious at the time for a gift quilt considering it was my first year in quilting!). It has sat mostly because the blocks are paper foundation pieced which while I like the technique, I find doing the actual piecing pretty tedious. But pulling this out and reviewing my notes I see that I saw a demonstration by Kaye Wood earlier this year where she pieced a similar block, without foundations, using one of her Starmaker rulers. I noted that the same could be done with the 60 degree triangle ruler that I already have (I have the one by Marti Michel that I am also using for Project #1 above)! There may be hope for this project yet and now when it's finished it can be mine! The pattern was in the June 2000 QNM and is a reprint of the same pattern that is in the book "Worth Doing Twice" by Patricia Morris and June Muir which I purchased much later.

5. Striped Squares

This is another old timer started back in 2005. I loved the "Take Four" quilt in Andrea Balosky's book "Transitions: Unlocking the Creative Quilter Within"which at the time seemed to me to be very "liberated" and "modern" as those terms are understood in the quilt world now. The plan was to make up blocks as I picked up interesting striped fat quarters here and there. Well, clearly I picked up the fat quarters but the urgency of other projects have kept me from working on this one. I might try to do this during the challenge as a block-a-week project.

It will be backed by solid squares of the same fabrics used for the pieced blocks so maybe in the end I can also quilt this one quilt-as-you-go.

6. Blue & White Many Paths

This one was started in 2006. At the time, Elisa Wilson of Backporch Designs had offered her "Many Path's" sampler as a free block-of-the-month on her website to promote her templates. I had already wanted to make a drunkard's path quilt and had already purchased Marti Michel's templates for that so was glad to have a design with different block styles to apply them to. Since then, Ms. Wilson has issued the BOM as a pattern for purchase (as seen in the Keepsake Quilting catalogue page in the picture and available now from other vendors if you do a google search).

Tea at the TeaQuilts blog purchased this pattern back in November and is doing it as a block-of-the-week challenge. I had hoped to do that with her to have the blocks finished as part of my Year-End Challenge. I might still catch up, I have pieces for one block ready to be sewn up that I had worked on when I started this project. If so, I then wanted to work on the top and finish the quilt for this PHD challenge. We'll see if I am doing all the blocks or just the top when 2011 starts!

Lastly, just in case I get stalled or ahead on any of these projects (the second being the less likely scenario), I have this stack of completed tops that are also awaiting quilting. So if I need a faster finish, they might get substituted for any of the above projects.