Do you have any quilt goals for 2023? I spent a good portion of my post-Christmas down time cooking up all kinds of plans and schedules for what I wanted to work on this year, only to have January 1 roll around and realize … something didn’t feel right. Most of what I’d mapped out fell into the category of ‘things I think I should do,’ rather than things I want to do. Which, fine, we all have things in life that we need to do even though we don’t want to … but this was all 100% self-imposed stuff! Strictly personal projects! All connected to an idea I once had about what my life should be about. And none of it involved sewing.
Pictured: Darling Buds, one of just two new quilt patterns I’ll release this year
I let it go for a bit and spent a few more days doing more or less nothing, trying to keep my plate clear and create space for the big fish. (Speaking of which, have you ever read David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish? Highly recommend if you ever start to feel like you’ve gone down the wrong path or creatively or that you’re just scratching the surface with your creatice work.)
What I realized is that I’m having the most fun when I’m working on Patch and Dot. And that there’s so much intensity and focus required at my day job, I almost owe it to myself to just follow my nose in my free time. So over on Instagram I listed some new goals – some specific projects, others more broad aspirations:
- Finish my Quilt Buzz Bingo checkerboard quilt
- More hand stitching
- Sew my stash
- Blackletter wall hanging (this is going to be a fun one, Dolly Parton fans stay tuned)
- Finish my Sugar and Spice quilt
- More hand stitching
- Two new patterns
But really I think that my true goals boil down to just three things:
- Be honest (with myself, about what my true work is)
- Slow down
- Share more (for every project I share I feel like there are two more that never see the light of day. And I’d like to start sharing more “in the real world” instead of just online. Maybe this is a reaction to seeing so much AI-generated art lately, who knows!)
Of course all these goals required a fun planner sheet to track them. This is a super simple tracker. I don’t have the stamina at the moment to keep tabs on every step of my many WIPs, the way you commonly would with most quilt planning sheets. Instead I’m using something more like the method I would use to check things off my list at work: identify an outcome, and then break it down into all the tasks I’ll need to complete in order to get there.
And I made a printable version that you can grab using the form below! Tip: Unlike with patterns, with these sheets I actually suggest you scale or shrink to fit these pages when printing.