Goodbye 2011

There have been plenty of recap posts that I've seen around in the last few weeks. I always enjoy reading them and find it useful myself to stop and have a think about what I've done and what I wanted to do, and then what my plans are moving forward.

This time last year I set myself the very non-specific 2011 goal of "take my time, enjoy the process and take on the challenge of learning new things":

2011 has been an interesting year for me. I finally submitted my PhD thesis, so 2012 will mark some very new things as I move onto the next stage of my career. It was important to me to maintain a balance between writing and the rest of my life, otherwise I would have gone crazy and never finished, so I still got a fair bit of sewing done, including learning new things.

Looking back I have actually had a very productive year, and more importantly the proportion of items that were successes were very high.

My absolute favourite finished item of 2011 is my Genome Quilt, no competition. It was a mammoth project, but I enjoyed every step of it (except maybe the basting), and I still absolutely love the finished thing.

I did finish another few quilts too, including the "striped strips" baby quilt

 

and my bee quilt for the "oh beehave" quilting bee for MMQG. I'm also about half way through hand quilting my spotty quilt top.

With regards to garments I finished quite a few things, and more importantly the proportion of successes was very high, with many of them becoming wardrobe staples. Here are some of my favourites (click on the pics to see the posts):

        

I also took part in "Me Made March", which was much less of a challenge than "Me Made May"that I took part in previously, partly due to having more me-made items, but partly because of the different (warmer) weather. I also succeeded in documenting it this time, which was probably the most challenging part. I really do wear my me-made clothes on a regular basis, so it wasn't really that much of a stretch for me to wear them for a month.

Now, looking forward? I don't think I have that many specific goals for next year, really I just want to keep on enjoying my hobby, and as with this year, learning new things is part of that. However, I think it's worth trying to come up with some kind of plan to increase the chances of my items being a success and being incorporated into my wardrobe. That's something that my "five favourites" post can help with. I do have some more specific plans in the works, but I'll save them for another post.

Happy New Year to all my readers, I'm very appreciative of everyone that takes the time to take a look at what I've been working on. I hope you've had a great 2011 and that you have an even better 2012.