45 days left, 45 quilts?

Can you believe there are only 45 days left in 2014?  As a teacher, it seems I am always counting down to something.  Days left in the quarter, semester or school year.  So, it seems natural that I checked the calendar to see how many days there are left in the year and when I saw there were 45 days left this year, I thought to myself, why not try and see if I could get 45 more quilts quilted by the end of the year?  Seems like a big goal, but with Thanksgiving break and Christmas break in there, I might have a chance of making it.  Plus, having a big goal means I will push myself to actually reach something other than sitting on the couch.

I have grand plans to clean the house enough for the kids to have a place to sleep when they come home for Christmas and that's only a couple of weeks away, so in the cleaning process I need to get some quilts quilted and out of here.  Might as well kill two birds with one stone and instead of just moving things around, actually get them up and out.

I loaded a long piece of backing fabric on the machine yesterday and started a quilt this morning before my walk.  It's almost done, so that's #1 of 45.  Who thinks I can actually achieve my goal?  Call me crazy, but I think I might actually be able to get this one done.

Today is Binky Sunday and we are cutting out Christmas Stockings for Veterans.  We will also be busting through some fabric scraps using both Accuquilt Studio fabric cutters.  It is so nice to have two machines going at the same time with all of the helpers we have at the meetings.  No waiting in line to use a machine.  With all the different dies we have, there's something for everyone to do.  Load a die, roll it through the machine, stack the cut fabric, sort the pieces, start over.  We can go through fabric quickly, which is great because I have a lot of donated fabric and then everyone takes something home to work on.

My friend Nancy, who put this cute quilt together, will be taking one of the Studio cutters home today to cut more quilt kits.  Her daughter and kids are living with her now and they are a great help at cutting fabric too.  The problem I'm having is keeping up with them.  They can crank out the quilt tops faster than I can quilt them and I have a huge backlog of quilt tops waiting their turn to be quilted.  Too bad I can't find more long arm quilters to volunteer their services to help us get caught up.  Perhaps this summer I can get some students to come over and I can teach them how to use the quilting machines.  Then I could take a nap while they quilted. :)