My 2020 Quilty Year in Review

Last week Angela, the leader of our online group Rainbow Scrap Challenge, asked us to share our 2020 RSC finishes for this final Scrappy Saturday link-up of the year. This year I followed along and made my selected blocks in the assigned color of the month. Some of those blocks have been sewn into quilts for this post, and others need more blocks and will carry over into 2021. However, there are some rainbow blocks from previous years that got made into finished quilts this year. 

In addition to the regular rainbow (all-color) quilts, I had so many scraps and orphan (leftover) blocks that I made a single-color scrappy quilt almost every month with that month’s assigned color. I called them “Creature” quilts, because like Frankenstein, they were made up of spare parts! The Creature Quilts names started out fairly straightforward. But as time went on, friends and fellow bloggers got into the spirit and helped come up with some whimsical and silly names. 

So, let’s get started.

Creature From the Green Lagoon, January

Creature From the Orange Grove, February

Creature From the Aqua Covid Lab, March (that’s when the novel coronavirus hit!)

There was no April Creature Quilt, because the color for April was light/bright blue, and my intent was to combine them with the dark blue scraps into one quilt later on.

Creature From the Mossy Mountain, May

Creature From the Bubblegum Factory, June

Creature From the Blue Precinct, July

For this next quilt, I didn’t have enough purple scraps to do an entire quilt. So I combined the purples with more orange scraps. I had wanted to work out some kind of volcano theme, but it just wouldn’t come together. Then I found the small piece of animal fabric, and that solved the problem.

Creature From the Sunset Savannah, August

Creature With the Ruby Shades, September.

The hollow blocks in the four corners rather reminded me of Elton John-style glasses, so that’s where the name came from.

Creature From Bumblebee Acres, October

November and December were for working with our neutral scraps (white and lights, black, browns and grays). Additionally, it was time to assemble the year’s rainbow blocks, if not already done, into quilts. 

Creature From the Foggy Lagoon (grays plus red for accent), November

Creature From the Haunted Pumpkin Patch (grays with orange accents), December

Creature With No Name, December

There were also three other traditional rainbow quilts that I completed in 2020.

Nine P.M. (9 Patch Madness), April

Garlic Breath, May

Scraptastic Stars, December

And there you have it - the fifteen RSC quilts I made this year. all of them except two (9PM and Garlic Breath) were donation quilts.

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Now I’ve begun some early work on January’s color, which will be pink. Also, one of my goals is to draw two project names from my list of quilts-to-be-made from the fabric themes of the scraps, kits and yardage I’ve been gifted with for Quilts For Kids.

The two January projects I’ll be working on (in addition to my RSC blocks, which I’ll introduce next week) are:  

                    Alphabet

                    Pink and Yellow Unicorn Cats

I’m so glad to have a pink project to work on simultaneously with pink scraps month. In fact, I’m wondering if I should maybe plan to do that moving forward.  We’ll see.  But let’s take a look at what we’ve got on tap for January.

Obviously, Alfie needed to get in on the act. He would NOT leave me alone while I sewed this week. He’s a very needy boy, so I had to stop several times just to hug and kiss and pet him. He is, after all, the boss.

So, here’s a better shot of these fabrics. Most are WOF (width of fabric) by anywhere from 7” to a half yard. It took awhile, but I came up with a plan, and will have enough fabric from these scraps to do a quilt that’s approximately 42x50”, including the back and binding. 

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the first blocks.

And then, here’s the Alphabet fabric, which was a piece from Angie. It’s the red one with the block letter in the center. The piece next to it with the bright dots on white is also a chunk she sent. I’ve pulled some possible pieces to go with it, as well as three yellow and red four-patches which were in the Quilts for Kids scraps. I’ll begin working on this project when the pink cats quilt is done.

In between preparing this post and working on getting January projects out the gate, I also assembled my Zipper blocks into a quilt top.

It’ll be another week or two before this one is sandwiched. Cousin Kim and I have our regular sewing Sundays, but this next one will be spent doing a lot of Show and Tell in addition to our usual sewing. Kim’s son-in-law works for Grace Quilting Company, and she got a lot of wonderful quilting accessories (not a long- or mid-arm machine) for Christmas. Woo-hoo!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, or whatever Holiday you celebrate. Ours was quiet, and enjoyable. Now we’re just about to the end of the year. I hate New Year’s Eve these days because of all the noise (scared pets) and fireworks - I’ve never really understood the appeal of loud, fiery things. Give me a good round of Auld Lang Syne anytime!