Let's Make Baby Quilts! {3/21/14}

Let's start with the happy stuff.

Audrey from Glory Be Quilter has finished seven baby quilts so far this year, and they're all adorable. I love, love, love this panel of smiling animal faces!

Janet from Simply Pieced has been making gorgeous baby quilts. Make sure you visit her post to see the great texture the quilting adds and the back, which looks just as impressive as the front! And she did a pair of quilts for twins that are equally wonderful. 

I've been putting off this part and hoping that I wouldn't have to write it at all but, after this week, I feel like it's time to explain why I've only finished one baby quilt and two tops in the past three months.

The goal I announced when I started the Let's Make Baby Quilts linky party last year was to make 50 baby quilts in 2013. I managed to finish twenty-nine and was sure I'd do better this year. Fifty is an achievable goal. (In 2010, I made forty-seven little quilts before the wonderful group I'd been making them for disbanded and I ran out of steam.) I know I'll have another fifty quilt year, but it's not going to be 2014.

At the beginning of December, my husband was in a head on collision with a drunk driver. You can see what it did to our SUV in this post. We're lucky he's alive. I didn't write about his injuries here, because that's not my story to tell, but we got MRI results this week and it's bad news, worse than the scariest worst-case scenario that the orthopedist had prepared us for.

I don't really know what else to say, except that I've been completely rattled by this whole thing and it sounds like the worst is still to come. We're as okay as we can be given the circumstances.

A break from blogging doesn't make sense at this point, because I don't know what's happening from day to day. I still wind up with time to quilt and write, but it's going to be less and less predictable. And since I really need to use it for stress relief right now, I'm going to completely drop the one-baby-quilt-a-week goal for the moment and just work on whatever seems like a good idea that particular day. Half inch finished squares are an amazing distraction and so is free motion quilting.

Please stick with me, even though I don't have many new baby quilts of my own to share right now.  The Let's Make Baby linky party will continue to go live every Friday at 4am Pacific Time, even if it's just the linky without any original content. I'll continue to feature my favorite baby quilts from each week and links to baby quilt tutorials. I have plans for new tutorials of my own and will add them to the blog as I get them written. When I find free patterns and tutorials online, I add them to the Let's Make Baby Quilts page over on Facebook and my Baby Quilt Tutorials board on Pinterest. (If anyone is interested in doing a guest post about what inspires their baby quilts, or wants to promote patterns for baby quilts, or something else that ties in with the theme, please send me an email!)

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 

Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned, but it's got to be about baby quilts. While we're still gathering steam, you're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button