Seasonal Goal Update: Autumn 2022

Hello Friends and Welcome Back!

Since last week's post, Autumn has truly set in here in Southern Ontario. The wind is blowing more coldly, mornings dawning more crisply, and leaves are coloured more vibrantly!

And along with the changing of the seasons, I like to take a look at my ongoing projects, new interests, and deadlines to help set new goals for the months ahead!

This week, I'll be sharing my goals for Autumn 2022! I have several projects that are already in progress and some that are totally new that I'm excited to start, and I'm hoping to find time to work on all of them!

Setting Goals

But before sharing my projects, I want to note that this Autumn's goals are going to be a little different than I've done in past seasons.

In the past, I've typically set very ambitious goals with the intention of completing projects, or making significant progress. However, I tend to work with many, many ongoing projects all at once; I enjoy bouncing between different techniques and patterns since it gives me a project for whatever I may be in the mood for at any given moment. As a result, many of my past goals have gone unfulfilled.

So this season, I'm going to be making very broad goals, mostly without absolute deadlines or specific amounts of progress. Instead of focusing on forward progress, at the end of fall, I want to look back and see how much I was able to progress on each project so that I can set more realistic goals in the future!

I'm excited to see how this works!

Sewing Room Renovations

The top priority for this Autumn is getting the sewing room back to a usable state.

As of today, we have taken down the old, cracked drywall, evened out the structure of the walls to remove the strange lip that previously ran around the top edge of the room, and started installing new drywall.

We also got a new exterior door with a full sized window so Meara can entertain herself watching the outside world while I sew. The door was only just installed last night!

Still to come is finishing the drywall, mudding, and repainting. We'll also be putting in ceiling lights, which the room previously did not have, new flooring, and lots of shelving! Once all of that is done, the room will be usable again and I'll be able to move back into it!

I'm hoping that we will be able to get all of that done within the next couple of weeks, wish me luck!

Quilt-Alongs

Moving back to quilting, I have recently started two quilt-along projects.

One of those is the Summer Garden BoM, a pattern of my own design that I'm hosting here on my blog! It's free for anyone to participate and is both beginner friendly and can be made as a scrap quilt to use up fabric remnants!

This project just started earlier this month and the only instructions to be released so far have been the fabric requirements.

The second quilt-along is The $3.31 Quilt; a mystery quilt designed by John MacPhail of Art East Quilting Co. and is being hosted by CQA for their members.

Like Summer Garden, this mystery project has only had fabric requirements released so far and block construction will begin next month!

Both of these projects will be released on a monthly schedule - Summer Garden near the beginning of each month and The $3.31 Quilt towards the middle - with instructions released a little at a time. My goal for both of these projects is simply to keep up. And since I've done many BoM style quilt-alongs in the past, I know that's a schedule I can easily keep up with!

General Quilting Projects

The next two quilts are the ones with the least structured goals attached to them. For both of these, I want to continue making progress, with some amount of stitching happening each month.

For Simply Woven, I've been aspiring to finish this quilt every season since I first started quilting it in Spring 2021. A year and a half later, it's still in progress.

There are a few reasons for this. First is that this quilt is about 80" square and is really challenging to quilt on a domestic sewing machine. Second is that the quilting design is probably more complicated than my beginner experience level was ready to handle. And finally, I kept adding new techniques I wanted to experiment with and changing my plan along the way.

All of this resulted in the project simply taking a long time. I don't regret this since I'm learning a lot and trying many new techniques, but I still want to be able to finish Simply Woven eventually, so more progress is needed!

The other project that I just want to make more progress on is the Generations Quilt. This is a collaborative project I started last fall with my Mom and Grandma. Together, we will be making several quilts with blocks made by myself, Mom, Grandma, and my Great-Grandmother who passed away before I was born.

Read more about that here.

We are still in the process of piecing blocks for this pattern, I'm about halfway through my total contribution, so as long as I continue working on it, I'll be happy!

Already this Autumn, I've completed one new Dresden and made progress on three others, a good start to this goal!

Since both of these projects do not have a set amount of progress associated with them, I'll be interested to see exactly how much they progress throughout the season and to apply what I learn to my future goals!

Garment Sewing

Along with my quilting projects, I also have a few garment projects I'd like to work on.

The first is my historically inspired linen shirt project. It was supposed to be a simple way for me to get back into garment construction but ended up taking significantly longer than expected due to the difficulty of finding linen thread.

My first spool got me through the construction of the garment, but came very close to running out during the finishing steps. I assumed ordering a new spool would be easy enough, but ended up running into shipping issues and didn't receive my thread until many months later.

I do finally have another spool and can continue working towards finishing the shirt! But while I would love to have it finished as soon as possible, I'm going to put the very general goal of any amount of progress on this project.

This is because of my second garment sewing project; an autumn costuming project!

I'll introduce this project formally in next week's post, but the summary is that it's an ice mage robe inspired by Tango Tek's Dungeon Master skin from the current season of Hermitcraft. If you know what any of that means, you'll quickly realize that I'm a huge nerd, but I'm very comfortable with that.

Tango Tek. Screenshot from "The Dungeon Master Awakens! - Hermitcraft 9: #24" taken at 1:03. 2022.

Like last year's quilted plague mask, my goal with this project is to have it complete before the end of October. Unlike last year's project, this will not be sewn entirely by hand and should progress much more quickly!

I'm really looking forward to seeing this come together and to sharing more information about it next week!

So it looks like I have six sewing projects as well as renovations planned for this Autumn; a lot to take on, but most of it without any definitive deadlines. I'm really looking forward to getting started on all of these and can't wait to share my progress with all of you!

If you have any personal or project goals for this Autumn, I'd love to hear about them! Feel free to share those with me in the comments below!

Friends, thank you so much for joining me again this week! Taking a step back from my projects to reevaluate and reprioritize has been really insightful and has helped me to feel prepared to take on all of these projects with renewed enthusiasm! I can't wait to get started!

Until Next Time Friends,

VA

Image Citation:

Tango Tek. "The Dungeon Master Awakens! - Hermitcraft 9: #24" 1:03. YouTube, uploaded by Tango Tek, 20 August 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_ySM7krQq4&ab_channel=TangoTek.