My 2025 Quilts

This year has been an interesting one for me creatively, with lots of inspiration, some time away from sewing, and then an explosion of new ideas and energy as I started teaching at the end of the year! Read on for a review of quilts I made this year, from super quick and tiny to big finishes…

In January, I joined this fun, free online event called Project Quilting, which is six weeks of prompts, one prompt per week, with a firm deadline for finishing a full quilt each week (Season 17 starts Jan 4, 2026, and I plan to join again)! I’m learning that I love working on surprise prompts with short timelines - it really tickles my brain and helps me explore different aspects of my creativity.

Here are my six projects, all started and completed between January and March of this year:

Clockwise from top left: The Skirt Quilt (buttons challenge), Peridot (birthstone challenge), Rainbow Rambler (common blocks challenge), Snallygaster (mythical creatures challenge), Somber Ombre (ombre challenge), Appa (arrows challenge).

I also made a handful of quilts for my quilt guild’s charity drive this year (including Rainbow Rambler featured in my Project Quilting collage above). Each quilt I played with shapes, colors, and composition - I love making small baby-sized quilts to test and experiment with ideas, and I find it very freeing to donate them. These are the quilts I made myself:

Clockwise from upper left: Feathers, Orphan blocks no. 1, Orphan blocks no. 2, Scrap Cabin (bottom two quilted by my friend Fran Scher; Scrap Cabin is a pattern by Rachel Labour)

And there was one special quilt I made with the help of my dcmqg charity quilting bee. Each month, a different member of the bee shares a theme and/or pattern with bee members, and the worker bees make several blocks to contribute to a collective quilt. My bee mates were very generous with my “Green Leaves” prompt, and I didn’t need to make a single block myself! I pieced them all together and machine quilted it loosely:

Then I hand quilted leaves across the whole quilt:

I also made a handful of personal quilts exploring different themes and ideas. My second Destroy this Quilt project (which I completed before finishing the first one!) turned into a fun exploration with a limited color palette and using thrifted clothing (with some adventurous binding at the end!):

SPLAT, May 2025

I made a simple piece inspired by Bias Tape Enzo workshop with Emily Watts. Emily uses bias tape to create incredible quilts that draw on the Zen Buddhist practice of ensō, a meditative practice of painting single circular brush-strokes. Mine are just those simple circles, with nothing else added:

I also joined in my first ever Quilt Race on the Quilty Nook, which was just the creative jolt I needed during a very stressful time. For Quilt Race, Zak provides a prompt at the top of the hour, and you have 60 minutes to create something based on the prompt, with whatever you have on hand. My quilt was inspired by a greeting card of a bird hanging above my sewing table:

Hope is a Bird, July 2025

One of the biggest quilts I started and finished this year is called Ode to Sand and Sea. I massively enjoyed the process of creating this quilt using Heidi Parkes’s Vignettes Quilt prompts - I selected fabrics, colors, and stories all connected to images and sensory experiences and unexpected surprises in many lived moments along the coast:

Finally, two significant quiltmaking accomplishments of my year are finishing two big quilt projects that were both works in progress at the beginning of the year - my first Destroy this Quilt project and my Wind quilt!

DTQ turned into a piece about earth, wind, water, and fire, and overall was such an eye-opening creative exploration with wild and wondrous creative prompts delivered every two weeks by Zak Foster on the Quilty Nook throughout 2024 - I joined the project mid-way and had a great time catching up over the summer, then followed along the rest of the year. The background of the quilt is an old rayon tablecloth that I bought for the folding card table that Dan and I used to use when we lived in apartments and moved around a lot…

My Wind quilt was my longest-running work in progress, which I started in June of 2022. I kept track of wind speed and wind gust highs every day in my town from June 1, 2022-May 31 2023, and used different values of the same print to visualize the year of wind, with darker shades representing low to no wind and lighter shades representing higher wind speeds:

Embroidered key with different wind speeds on the lower right front section of the quilt

I used crochet thread to hand-tie each wedge in a contrasting color

These are just a snapshot of what I made this year; my full gallery of 2025 quilt finishes is here!

This year, like every year, was a year of ups and downs, and I didn’t feel as much of a continuous flow with my quilting practice as I have felt in recent years. But some exciting changes took place this year, most notably the start of my teaching journey, and it will be interesting to see how the dynamic of teaching continues to play a role in my creative exploration. I’m finding myself drawn to teachers who I admire, and learning both what they are teaching while also taking notes on how they are teaching! I’m looking forward to more learning and growth and ups and downs next year.

How was your creative year? Did you have any surprises or unexpected changes that led you in new creative directions? Send me a message and let me know what you’ve been up to this year!