End of year goals

As the year speeds to an end, I think about what I would like to accomplish before 2012 gets here.  My goals have become loose with all of the health issues I've had to deal with these past couple of years, but it is still nice to have them in the back of my mind. 

With this week off and not having much school work to deal with, I've tried tackling the sewing room.  I've made more of a disaster out of it than I have accomplished, but I still have the rest of today and tomorrow to get things picked up and put away so hopefully things will look better before I go back to school and I can show you something looking nice tomorrow.

I am 8 quilts away from 300 for the year.  That's a lot of quilts quilted!  No wonder my shoulder gave out on me.  Most of those were done for the Quilts for Japan campaign and most were done around the same time.  I had to slow down significantly once the shoulder said to stop, but I am hopeful to get the last 8 done before the year comes to a close.  I did one yesterday and need to post the picture so that leaves 7 more.

Thursday, I got the grand idea to pull backing fabric for all of the quilt tops I have around here.  I am tired of looking at all of the fabric on my shelves and tired of looking at all of the quilt tops, so figured if I paired up the two, I would be more motivated to quilt them.  Some go together easily and some are more of a challenge.  Some of the backing fabric needs to be pieced together so that is a nice break from just pulling giant piles down and sorting. 

I'm also sewing Christmas stockings.  I'm up to 320 finished stockings and there seems to be at least that many more to go.  I know the kids can't fill that many so I'm ok with leaving the rest for next year's project, or working on them throughout the year and sending them along to projects next September that are asking for stockings to be sent overseas to troops stationed far away.  I'm thankful we don't have that many wounded soldiers so close to home.

I'm also trying to clean out the project bins.  I found some 8 1/2 inch squares yesterday and in a matter of 10 minutes had a top sewn together.  Who knows how long the squares had been sitting in the bin, but now they are one step closer to becoming a quilt.  Silly how long something has to sit in an unfinished stage when it is so simple to move it along.

Well, I'm off to a tennis tournament with my daughter.  She won yesterday so we are off early this morning for round 2. 

No Black Friday shopping for me, except for some tools for my son, who is working on his robot for a school project.  It is driving him and the rest of the family insane because he can't get it to work!