Under some very suspicious circumstances, I found myself being squeezed out of my sewing spaces, to the extent that towards the end of the 1990's, I was sharing my sewing area in a VERY small enclosed back porch with the laundry room, the pantry, my home-based word processing business. My supplies were scattered all over the house and storage sheds. It was incredibly frustrating. Fortunately, (in one sense), my younger girls had begun middle school and I no longer was sewing clothing for them. On the other hand, I simply didn't have the physical space necessary to sew anything, anyway! Did I mention it was incredibly frustrating?

In retrospect, I think I was a very cranky Mommy for a number of years .. I never realized just how important being creative was to me until I wasn't able to do anything.

The heavens opened up, the sun shined upon me, the Fates were favorable, Mr. Pirate loves me .... we demolished the old enclosed back porch, remodeled it into a new 400 square foot room, subdivided into 3 areas: laundry/pantry, office and A 200 SQUARE FOOT SEWING ROOM!!! I thought I had died and gone to heaven. :-)

By the end of 2000, I could see that I was really going to have a new sewing room the spring of 2001, but I couldn't wait. In a very small area in the living room (where a LOT of the stuff from the demolished back porch was being stored), I set up a temporary sewing area and made a quilt *for me* (what a concept!).

I was estatic! I was thrilled! Just call me "butter" cuz I was on a roll! I was sewing and wasn't going to stop! In the winter of 2000 alone, I made a combination of 6 quilts, 3 blocks for 2 comfort quilts, 5 quilted Christmas stockings and begun my now (in)famous Forever Project. That's FIFTEEN quilty projects in FOUR months! Compare that to the previous 15 quilts in 21 years. :-)

Running Totals: Finished projects: 44. WIP: 0

Running Totals: Finished projects: 58. WIP: 0

Running Totals: Finished projects: 89. WIP: 1

Running Totals: Finished projects: 101. WIP: 1

Running Totals: Finished projects: 104. WIP: 2

This top was quilted in March 2010.

I did 42 projects in 2016. This section is a placeholder for those quilts.

Why so few? Well, my focus dramatically shifted. It occured to me that since my parents, all of my aunts and uncles and most of my cousins have passed on, *I* am the Keeper of the Memories. That realization hit me like a ton of bricks. I have always been interested in family genealogy but at this point, I realized that it was a crucial juncture. If *I* didn't put all my memories and research into hard form ... such as heritage photo scrapbhooks ... all the research, information, documentation, and identification of photographs would be lost when I died. Yeah, that's a morbid thought but totally realistic.

So, I switched my energies from working on my still substantial but dwindling pile of quilting UFOs to creating heritage scrapbooks for all my family lines, as well as the family lines of my husband. My intent was to document, as thoroughly as I was able, the backstory and memories of my and his families so that our children (and tangentially, our nieces and nephews) would know of their history.

To my dismay, I discovered that this was one area where I simply could not multi-task: if I was quilting, the scrapbooks were neglected. If I worked on the scrapbooks, no quilting was getting done. That's just the way it is.

This section is a placeholder for the 2017 quilts.