January One Monthly Goal Complete

I'm coming in under the wire, but last night I managed to finish the quilting that I set as my One Monthly Goal, hosted by Patty at Elm Street Quilts 😊 I had set the goal with two parts: to finish the quilting on at least one more first responder quilt and to get a count of how many quilts I have on hand and how many quilts still need to be finished in order to finally give the quilts to our town's first responders. (For those who don't know/don't remember, all of the blocks for these quilts were donated in a HUGE wave of support after a senior citizen's home across the road from us burned down almost two years ago.)

Here's the most recently quilted, but not yet bound, quilt. I quilted it with my go-to loopy design in Aurifil 2600.

Then today I pulled out all the stacked quilts and attached a slip of paper with the name of one of the first responders to each one. Here they are all together. Don't they look fabulous stacked up like this?

This stack contains 26 finished quilts and 2 that are quilted, but not yet bound. There are another 2 quilts with a longarmer in town who is going to quilt them for me, for a total of 30. At the time of the fire, we had 31 first responders. 31! That means only 1 more quilt to go!! And I have the top and backing pieced for it, it just needs to be quilted 😊

When I wrote my One Monthly Goal post back at the beginning of the month, I was thinking that I'd also make quilts for the new RCMP and fire fighters, but when I messaged the fire chief about that he said that, while he appreciates it, it isn't necessary to include the new people. And since including them would mean piecing and quilting another 6 quilts, which would take me months since I'd have to fit it in around all of my other obligations, I'm inclined to agree with him.

I am excited to be almost finished this project! It has been such a wonderful project and it was amazing to experience firsthand the generosity of this wonderful quilting community, but it will be nice to be finished and to cross it off my to-do list, finally. Giving the quilts to the first responders will also free up a bit of space in our house, lol.

I have a couple of other things I need to finish before I can quilt that last quilt, but you can be sure I will be getting to it as soon as I can 😊