The holidays have passed, my Christmas decorations are put away and we are almost two weeks into the new year. At this time of year I used to look at what I did in the past year and outline what I hoped to focus on during the new year. My thoughts on both are sort of rumbling around in my head but I am going to try to jot them down.

The biggest event in 2024 was the birth of my third grand daughter. Clearly she has decided to make her parents crazy from the get go. She arrived a full three weeks early. When my son told me she had been born early in the morning on an October day, I was so surprised. No one was expecting her so soon! On her second day in this world, the pediatrician noticed something awry with her heart. It turned out to be pulmonary stenosis. In brief, this condition is a defect in the pulmonary valve to the heart and it restricts the blood flow from the right ventricle to the lungs. It is a big deal and when a 6 pound newborn is sent by ambulance to Children’s Hospital. It is just terrifying. She was in the ICU for the better part of a week. Her parents were afraid as were we. But the pediatric cardiac surgeon did a very successful procedure to enlarge the ventricle and she is just fine. It is likely this procedure will have to be repeated when she is older. She will also have cardiac care forever, to monitor the valve. However they say she is healthy and it should not be a huge issue. Yikes, this little one threw all of us for a loop in those first days.

Of course I did make my grand daughter a little quilt. I had a fun time with it and finished in back in September. I gave it to her parents at a baby shower in late September. For the quilt, I chose a stack of nine fabrics (nine was an instrumental number as I will explain in a bit). Each block is a six inch square that is ’rounded’ to a snowball shape using stitch and flip corners. For the corners, while I didn’t sew them on improv style, they were very free-hand. Each circle is a bit different from the last and I squared them up to make the blocks the same size. However, the triangles between them are all slightly different.

The fun part was this. When I was making blocks, I began to dread the process of laying the pieces out and balancing which fabric was where, making sure no two same fabrics touched, etc. I was thinking about how to do this with some logic and less hassle and thought about Sudoko puzzles.

Because I settled on nine fabrics, I was able to assign a number to each fabric and then just place them as they were on the puzzle. This put one of each in each row and column. I didn’t think about it at all and sewed nine patch blocks to match the puzzle. It was so simple. Of course as I sewed the nine patches together, I flipped one the wrong way and the whole thing now had a kink in it but at that point, it didn’t really matter. For the most part the fabrics were laid out in a balanced fashion. There is a print with a bird on it and the birds are pointing all in one direction but in the photo below, the quilt is sideways. So the birds are lying down and resting. 😉

This Sudoku method was super helpful for me and I will totally use it again.

Below you can see the backing and binding. The ‘I Love You’ fabric is actually a crib sheet. Her bed has these sheets and I thought it would be fun to use one on the back of the quilt. I quilted it free motion with hearts and flowers on the snowballs and a curvy line in the first border.

When I looked at my projects for 2024, I found I had made seven quilts. This is the lowest number in years! The bug to sew and quilt was not nearly as strong as it was. I did make some garments which I shared in this post. I have a couple of quilts I haven’t yet shared and will write a post on them soon-ish.

The fact that I made just seven quilts, seemed to create less of a need to post on the blog. In 2024, I wrote only 17 posts! For someone who enjoys writing and talking about whatever to whomever, that isn’t a whole lot of blogging!

This leads one to wonder what the heck I did do all year. Thinking back, plus looking at my photos on my phone (the best way to look back in time) I see my time was spent with family, our grand daughters, running, working on my crochet skills, volunteering for Friends of the Library and reading.

I worked on improving my time for running 3 mile stretches (5 km races) and did shave off a considerable amount. Over the year I ran 224 miles. In the end of April I pulled a muscle in my calf and had to take the entire month of May off from running. But averaging the miles ran over 11 months means I ran about 20 miles each month. Over the year, if I didn’t run, I tried to make sure to walk. My total for walking was 268 miles.

My volunteer work at the library continues to evolve. It is such a great group of women and I very much enjoy working there. I have taken on a few projects and love being able to contribute my time as there is such a direct correlation to increasing the funds raised for the library.

For 2025 – Hmmm…. I don’t have a huge list of goals for sewing. I have been working on donation quilts using up the stacks of charm squares I have. One quilt top is nearly done and a second is laid out on the floor of the sewing room. Simple quilts that will use fabric from my shelves. I want to continue on with this. Also, I bought the DuoLingo app and have been practicing my Spanish. I have only a tiny bit of Spanish that remains in my brain since taking it in high school in the 1970’s. Time to stretch my brain cells and see what I can re-learn! Running to keep fit is still high on the list. Can I squeeze in more than 20 miles each month? I know there is time to do it, mostly I just have to put on my shoes and get out there!

There is always more to be said but for now, this is enough. Wishing you all the best in 2025 – good health, much joy and lots of time to be creative!