Five Years of March 18th

Hmm…what were we doing this time last year, or the year before, or the year before that? I’ve been blogging for more than 5 years and this blog has become my own personal time travel machine.

I can scroll back through the older posts and remember trips we’ve taken, when important quilts and projects were started, and see my little boy James transform from a chubby 2 year old to the super skinny 8 year old he is now.

So today I’d like to blast back to the past and see what was happening on March 18th for the last five years!

This time last year Josh was quilting in a Rail Fence Block for the Building Blocks Quilt Along. Working together on that project was sometimes challenging, but mostly fun, and it taught us both a lot about how to communicate and make good videos.

After we worked together on that project, we began filming all videos together, though Josh definitely prefers to be the man behind the camera, not in front of it!

On this day in 2013, I was sharing a new free motion quilting design called Zigzag Spiral for the Express Your Love Quilt Along.

That was design #382 and it just goes to show how easily new designs can be created by combining simple shapes together. In this case it was Zippling combined with Basic Spiral to create Zigzag Spiral. Around that time I remember making a list of every shape I could think of and extrapolated over 225 new designs!

Now what was happening three years ago? We were right at the beginning of the very first Free Motion Quilt Along, which was a much more open ended, random assortment of videos and link ups. In response to a lot of questions I’d received about building quilting skills I wrote the post Blueprint to Mastery.

In this post I directly addressed the two issues that seem to hold quilters back the most: lack of time and too much negativity. Reading back through this post, I’m reminded again of the struggles I went through and still see from quilters in my classes.

Free motion quilting is tough and in the beginning it’s pretty ugly!

You HAVE to practice it every day and keep building your skills or it’s just not going to happen. Why do you think I started this blog?

To challenge myself to create designs and dedicate myself to learning free motion quilting. I know for a fact that I wasn’t a very good quilter when I started, but within 40 days, my abilities had changed exponentially, and yours can too!

Now for what I posted back in 2011 which oddly fits into this whole theme – it was an update to the Transformation Challenge. The challenge was to create a letter page sized quilt featuring at least 5 filler designs from the blog.

The challenge was a fun way to encourage quilters to start quilting and designing on a small scale. Transformation was the theme and it was interpreted in many unique and creative ways. You can find all the finalists and winners to this challenge right here.

While it was a fun challenge to host, I wasn’t able to keep up with the logistics end of the project. I didn’t end up making the quilt featuring all the challenge quilts (too many projects, not enough time!), but it was loads of fun to see all the beautiful, creative quilts that were created with designs from the project.

Now what was posted back in 2010 – the very first March 18th on this blog? That day I posted Knit Stitch, design #145. Looking back, I know this was one of my absolute least favorite designs, so it’s kind of funny it ended up being posted today five years go!

I can honestly admit that I don’t like all the designs I’ve shared. At that time I was posting 4-5 new designs per week and that level of production required me to post any design that popped into my head, no matter how ugly they were.

It’s been a mixed bag, looking back at all the posts on March 18th. Some of these posts have made me smile, some have made me cringe, but isn’t that life? Are there months or years of your life that you just don’t want to remember? I personally wish I could just erase all of 2002!Ultimately I’m so happy that I started blogging back in 2009 and extremely thankful for this record of my creative journey over the years. I will always have a better memory of these years and what I created and how I felt because of these posts.

So what about today? On this March 18th Josh is packing orders downstairs with lots of help from James who is out for spring break.

I’ve been spending the day upstairs designing new quilts and writing articles. Right now I have a lot of “secret” projects in the works that might stop me from posting here as regularly as I like. Rather than fight it, I’ve learned to accept the ebb and flow of this business. Suffice it to say there will be a lot of really, really awesome new stuff coming out soon!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little blast from the past as much as I have. Do you know what you were doing 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 years ago today? Blogging is definitely a cool way to keep track of life as it happens and be able to quickly look back too.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah